


The Sound of Silence

by NyxEtoile, OlivesAwl



Series: Somewhere They Can't Find Me [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. References, F/M, POV Alternating, PTSD, Post-Avengers (2012), Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-16 06:08:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1334893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyxEtoile/pseuds/NyxEtoile, https://archiveofourown.org/users/OlivesAwl/pseuds/OlivesAwl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Silence stretched between them. Most of their relationship was forged in silence. They both tended to live there, in the pause between breaths. It was when the silences had become unbearable that he'd known he had to go. "You out for good?" Nat did not believe in polite small talk.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>He wished he knew. "If I say yes, will I never see you again?"</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Her shoulders tightened, then relaxed. She half turned, the fire painting her in harsh light and dark shadow. She studied him a moment, then the corner of her mouth tilted up, ever so slightly. "Of course not. How would I convince you to change your mind?"</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to make _very clear_ that this is not part of my Dark Inside series. Not even in the same world. This is a stand-alone Clint/Nat story I wrote with my writing partner. (I finally coaxed her over to doing fan fic, mwahahahaha.) She will be getting an AO3 account after she gets home from a business trip and I'll add her as co-author then.
> 
> This is mostly a post-Avengers fic but it does reference events from Thor: The Dark World so you may be briefly confused/spoiled if you haven't seen that.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to my (our) awesome beta SweetTeaFrances who catches all the missing commas and returns them to their rightful places.

_Stitch Point, Alaska  
January, 2014_

This was a wild goose chase.

Natasha Romanov had been in enough dicey situations to listen to her instinct when it told her an op was about to go south. And at the moment, her gut told her she was sitting on this damn dogsled for no good reason. Unfortunately, turning around wasn't really a viable option.

She craned her head to look back at the driver, wishing she could have just called for a helicopter or some other modern form of transportation. Her current op floated a little too far into the gray area of official vs. unofficial. Fury wouldn't send her a helo. 

As a bonus, the driver felt conversational. He was missing two of his upper teeth and lisped when he talked. "So you know Boris, eh?"

She nodded, and muttered, "Probably not," at the same time, fairly sure the wind would cover her voice. She'd lost the trail in Fairbanks; until some _other_ toothless moron had tried to hit on her in the bar, where she was drowning her failure in terrible whiskey. Just before she considered breaking his hand so he'd go away, the man had mentioned a bartender in the mining town he was from who had brought down a bear with a bow and arrow. Who had showed up eight months ago with a bunch of cash. And his name was Boris.

So now she was on a sled in the wilderness, on the off chance a man who could hide from God himself if he wanted to - and certainly from SHIELD - was asking her to find him, via the most terrible, stupid, ridiculous joke he could think of.

The town came into view and she felt her nose wrinkle. That was not a town. Natasha knew towns. They had streets and multistory buildings. Infrastructure. This looked like an historical reenactment. Or a Hollywood set. If she pushed on one of the store fronts, there was a good chance it would topple. _This_ is where he'd come to be someone else? She was beginning to hope Boris was a large, bearded ex-KGB agent old enough to be her father. They could share a bottle of vodka and some war stories and she could go back to her failure. Otherwise, she might actually have to kill him.

Toothless ran the dogsled right into town, stopping in front of a building labeled simply Saloon. She ignored his offered hand and dug herself out of the blankets and furs she'd buried herself in. She grabbed the strap of her duffle bag and looked up at the wooden sign in dismay. Her driver said something but she ignored it for his own safety, holding out a handful of bills. When he took it, she hitched her bag over her arm and walked forward, pushing the saloon door open with her shoulder.

_Please be former KGB._

Inside it was dim and smokey, and smelled like beer and cigarettes. It was full of flannel shirts and furry hats. There was a bear head mounted over the bar. The only person behind it was a satisfyingly gray-haired man. Chairs scraped on the floor, glasses clinked, talking stopped, and every single eye in the room became trained on her.

She unwound the scarf she'd used to protect her mouth from the wind and cold and slipped her sunglasses up. She gave the crowd a very deliberate once over until people began to look away, then walked to the bar. The gray-haired man met her as she took a stool. "Vodka," she said, tugging her gloves off.

The man poured her a rather generous glass out of an unlabeled bottle he pulled from beneath the bar and handed it over. She looked at it for a moment, trying to guess if it was going to be really good, or really bad. That was all you ever got from a bottle like that.

The bartender was watching her intently, which made her suspect bad. She picked up the glass anyway and looked at him. "I'm looking for Boris." She slugged back half the glass in one go and hissed slightly, pleasantly surprised. Now _that_ was vodka.

Nat didn't miss his eyes flicking to something behind her. She turned. . . and there he was. The only person alive who could sneak up on her. His appearance startled her - shaggy hair and in need of a shave, dressed in a t-shirt and a leather apron that had blood all over it. 

She'd thought a lot about what she'd say when she saw him. What he might say. It most certainly was not a very casual, "Hey, Nat."

They stared at each other a long moment. He looked braced for something and the longer she looked at him, the tenser he got. Finally, she lifted her glass, tipped back the rest of the vodka and slammed the glass on the bar-top. She looked back at him and arched her brow. "Boris? Really?"

He smiled, and he shrugged. He gestured at the bartender. "Did he give you the good stuff?"

"If you have better than that, I'd like to taste it." She glanced back at the bartender, who refilled her glass. "You're a hard man to find, Barton."

His face changed, and then he stalked around the bar and pulled out the unlabeled bottle out from wherever it lived. "I'll be in the back," he said, and then took the bottle through a door off to the left. She hoped he meant for her to follow, because she sure as hell was.

It was like a meat locker in there - perhaps literally as there was a carcass of something hanging from a hook on the ceiling. He took a swig of the vodka from the bottle, set it down, and picked up a knife from the table. "I figured you would," he said finally.

She watched him warily as he started hacking into the carcass. Butcher and bartender. Add in candle making and he'd be a delightfully fucked up nursery rhyme. "I knew you needed your space," she said. "I sent feelers out now and then, but no bites." She shrugged. "Figured that meant you weren't done yet."

Whatever that carcass was, he was slicing it up not with a butcher knife, but with the one he wore in his boot. The one he'd tried to kill her with on the helicarrier. "So what does he want?"

No need to ask who he was talking about. "Fury didn't send me. Technically, I'm off the reservation. Or on leave. We weren't clear on specifics." She paused, watched him hack off a decent sized slab of mystery meat and found herself seriously considering a few days of vegetarianism. "We got intel I thought you'd like to hear."

He began stacking hunks on the table beside him. "I heard about Asgard bringing its bullshit to Earth, part three. We do have news up here."

She hadn't been entirely sure about that, but it was good to know she could skip some exposition. "Thor's staying on Earth for the foreseeable. He checked in to let us know." She watched the knife go back into the meat and sighed. No way but the hard way, sometimes. "Loki's dead."

The knife stopped moving, but he didn't turn. "Who killed him?"

"When I say this, I really need you to appreciate how much I hate Asgardian naming conventions." No reaction. This was worse than she'd thought. "Apparently, a Dark Elf."

He sighed. "Well," he said finally. "Maybe Stark will stop calling me Legolas."

"I know it's not how you'd have liked it to go down," she said gently. But not too gently. He knew her fake gentle voice when he heard it. "But I thought you'd like to know."

"Days like this I wish I believed in hell." He seemed to contemplate his dead whatever. "That isn't true. I'm 99% sure there's no hell. The 1% isn't much, but it has, on occasion, kept me alive." He said it so casually, as if that would keep her from noticing the confession.

Definitely worse than she'd thought. "Apparently, the Asgardians have one," she offered. "One 'L.' " She drew a little line in the air before folding her hands behind her back. "So there's that." She strolled slowly to the other side of the carcass so she could look at his face. "Not sure how to play this one, Barton," she told him honestly. "You still being someone else? Or are you ready for a friendly face?"

He held her eyes, for long enough she felt the knot in her chest loosen, just a tiny bit. "Have you ever had caribou, Nat?"

*

Stitch Point was south of the arctic circle, well below the timber line. But winter in Alaska was still winter in Alaska; and it was a long, dark winter. Clint hadn't quite gotten used to it. The cold he liked. That was a new thing, a strange gift from Loki. In a way, he supposed it was a scar, just like all the others he'd collected.

It was weird as hell, though. He could see Nat casting glances at the leather jacket he'd tossed on while she bundled herself back into her winter gear. He should probably explain that to her at some point. Maybe later. After dinner.

He did turn the heat in his house up for her. Usually it was at 55 or so - just enough to keep the pipes from freezing. The dial on sixty-eight got him the reward of her taking off her coat, so he could watch her from the doorway as she circled his living room. Casing the room for potential weapons and escape spots, no doubt. Perhaps looking for clues about its occupant.

Whatever it was, she was moving slowly and pretending not to pay attention to him. Almost certainly wondering what he was thinking about. He wished it was something worthy of her concern, but, as she had not relinquished her title as the most beautiful woman who'd ever graced the face of the planet, he was perfectly content to stand there and stare.

 _Yep. You've come all this way to have a serious conversation with me about why I've gone AWOL, and I'd rather stand here and imagine you naked._ It was nice she couldn't actually read his mind. That train of thought was as pointless as it had always been.

He sighed and pushed off the doorway. "Let me go grab some wood and get a fire going."

She nodded and picked up the bag, heading unerringly towards his spare room. Because she was Nat, and she knew him better than anyone, and she knew his bedroom would be the one farthest from the front door. She stopped halfway there, as if remembering her manners, and turned back to him. "Guest room?" she asked with feigned innocence.

He held out his hand. "All yours. It's a flip-and-fuck." He paused, and felt compelled to add, "Not that anyone's fucked on it."

Her face went deadly serious. "Are you sure? Was it bought new? I'm not sleeping on a second hand frat boy fold out, am I, Barton?"

That made him smile. "Came sealed in plastic. Real mattresses are expensive as hell to get up here." _I have one. If you'd care to join._ "Going to deal with the fire," he said, and left her to settle in. 

What in hell was wrong with him? He'd had a lid on this for years. Live alone in the snow for eight months and suddenly. . . He shook his head, wishing the cold felt more bracing than it did. He loaded a couple of logs in his arms and made a note that he needed to split some more soon, especially if she was going to stick around. She was nowhere to be seen when he got back inside, so he set about building the fire.

She reappeared once he'd gotten it blazing. She was wearing a new outfit, black jeans and a soft grey t-shirt. He was fairly sure she owned clothes that weren't black, white, grey, or red. He'd seen blue occasionally. There had been a pink blouse once, but it had been during a mission and probably didn't count. It was usually just those four, though. The neutrals were for camouflage. The red was just an affectation.

She stood next to him and held her hands out to the fire. "Why here?"

"It's a mining town." He stood, making his way over to the leather couch and sinking into it. "There was a certain job profile I was bouncing around in. Oil fields, gas fracking, that sort of thing. Harsh conditions, isolated area, high turnover, physical strength more important than background. Not a lot of questions. Thought I'd try mining. Then the owner of the bar couldn't handle the midnight sun. Sold it to me for piss change. So here I stayed. I built a still."

"That was some good vodka," she admitted, still staring into the fire. Silence stretched between them. Most of their relationship was forged in silence. They both tended to live there, in the pause between breaths. It was when the silences had become unbearable that he'd known he had to go. "You out for good?" Nat did not believe in polite small talk.

He wished he knew. "If I say yes, will I never see you again?"

Her shoulders tightened, then relaxed. She half turned, the fire painting her in harsh light and dark shadow. She studied him a moment, then the corner of her mouth tilted up, ever so slightly. "Of course not. How would I convince you to change your mind?"

That made him smile. God, how he'd missed her. He'd made a systematic effort to remove from his life anything worth caring about. Anything he couldn't just walk away from. He'd done it long ago and for very good reasons. Everything and everyone were kept on the other side of the line, just in case. The only person who wouldn't stay there was her. She'd have found him on the moon. "You could sell ice to Eskimos." He paused. "You know, I know some now, if you ever wanted to try that."

"I'll keep it in mind." She turned to face him fully and spread her hands. "So. Caribou. That's like ugly venison?"

"Mostly. And I should get it cooking." He stood up, and then turned back halfway to the kitchen. "Natasha."

She'd gone back to the fire, but turned at her name and arched a brow. There were a hundred things he wanted to say but couldn't. So he settled on, "Thank you for coming here."

Her mouth tipped up again, into her honest smile. "Thanks for being here."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my thanks to my beta SweetTea for proofreading and fact checking. You're awesome, sister.

Natasha was an early riser. She was also a night owl, being one of those people who only really needed five or six hours of sleep a night. The long, dark Alaskan winter night did nothing to change her natural Circadian rhythms. So, even though Barton was still fast asleep at seven am, she was wide awake, hungry, and antsy.

Stitch Point was small enough that barring a blizzard, she was comfortable walking to just about anywhere, given enough layers. So she bundled up, left a note that read _Went for groceries. You only have man food._ and walked down to the general store.

There were a handful of people up and about at the early hour. Natasha was used to blending in when she was somewhere new. Sure, she was pretty and female and the hair stood out. But she worked very hard to be mostly forgettable. To play the executive assistant, or the debutante, or the frightened call girl. Whatever it took to get ignored at the most important moment. You just needed to figure out what would be the least noticeable.

Here, there was no right answer. People _stared_ at her. She made eye contact when it got creepy and the person - usually a man - would find somewhere else to look. But he'd look right back when she continued on. Some of it was that she was new in town. Some of it was that she was pretty. All of it was unnerving. She didn't know how Barton had managed it here for eight months. She'd have shot someone a week in.

He was awake when she showed up with her bags. The house smelled like coffee and she left her stuff on the table and shed her outerwear on the way to the carafe. "I'm beginning to think no one in this town has seen a redhead before," she told him after her first sip of caffeine.

"There is a dearth of pretty girls," he replied. "Believe me. I looked."

She scrunched up her nose as she sipped her coffee. "People stared. I almost drew on a guy who didn't understand aggressive body language when he saw it. How have you been here eight months without causing an incident?"

"I am not a pretty girl." He drained his coffee, and got up for a refill. Took the bottle of vodka from last night and dumped a splash in. It made her think of Stark dumping a little booze into seemingly everything he drank. Add another checkmark for 'worse than she thought'.

He'd noticed her attention. "Don't add that to your list."

Difficult conversations were easier if her hands were busy. She went to the table and started unpacking her groceries. "What list?"

"Whatever list you're making about my current mental state. Living in the wilderness. Not shaving. Dismembering caribou. Contemplating suicide. Drinking at nine AM. Did I miss anything?"

Why had she bought a six pack of fruit cocktail _and_ a six pack of mandarin oranges in syrup? How long was she planning to stay here? "Impervious to cold," she said, distracted, still contemplating her impulsive fruit snack purchases. "Though I guess that's not technically your mental state."

"I don't understand the cold thing, either. Bodily possession by a frost giant apparently has a very weird hangover."

She looked up at him. "I swear to God, Barton, if you get super powers I'm going to have to start hanging out at nuclear test sites." He was next to the fridge so she tossed him the can of orange juice concentrate she'd bought to save herself five steps.

He shoved it in the freezer. "If I gained something from this, I would not be able to live with myself."

Fair point. "Why can't I add the drinking to my list?" she asked. If they were acknowledging the list and he was claiming veto rights to its contents, then he needed to give a good reason for it. "It seems list worthy."

He came over to take the case of fruit cups from her. He didn't comment, thought she knew he knew about her and sugar. "I don't do it when I'm alone. It doesn't make it quiet. If anything, it makes it louder."

She watched him walk the snacks over to the cabinet and stretch to put them up. He moved the same, she noted. Muscle shifting under skin and shirt in the most interesting ways. Nat knew far more about anatomy than the average person, without an MD. Medical texts were an assassin's secret weapon. She could name all those muscles he was using. _Trapezius, deltoid, rhomboid minor, supraspinatus, levator scapulae. . ._ But somehow it didn't really capture the pure visceral pleasure of watching an archer's arm move.

Wait, they'd been having a conversation here somewhere. "Did you just tell me I drive you to drink?"

He didn't turn. "Well. The questions you ask, mostly."

She lined out the rest of her purchases, at least the ones that belonged in the kitchen. The shampoo, conditioner, and razor stayed in one bag to go to her room later. "We can sit in silence, if you want. But that didn't seem to be working for you."

"Nope," he said, something vaguely accusatory in his voice. "It didn't."

She had the distinct feeling that she was being yelled at for something, which was awkward because she was a little pissed at him, herself. "Well. I guess you could try running away again, but we're pretty much at the edge of the world here."

She could see his shoulders tighten. "I was going to try answering you honestly."

This is why she did interrogations. She was good at playing people. At feigning whatever emotion it was that would get them talking. But when you handed her an ally and some real emotions, she stuck her expensive leather boot into it. She ran her hands through her hair with a sigh and gathered up the yogurts and cheese she'd bought and ended up making those five steps to the fridge after all. "I'm sorry," she said, wishing it didn't come out gruffly. "That was uncalled for."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him turn and watch her put them away. "I'm not any good at this. I'm even worse than you. At least you pretend to have this sort of conversation with lots of people." It sounded bad, but she knew exactly what he meant.

It took a great deal of effort not to organize the yogurts alphabetically by flavor. Barton knew her better than anyone else in the world but even he didn't need to witness the depth of her compulsive habits. "Pretending is easy. I know what I want to get out of the conversation. So I pull threads until I find the one I want and I yank until I get to the end." She straightened and closed the door. "Doesn't work like that with you."

"You could just tell me what you want out of this conversation," he suggested. "And I could try to answer."

Oh, good, an easy goal. She felt like the granola bars and mint tea on the table weren't going to be put away today. "Honestly? 'Sure, 'Tash, I'm done playing Paul Bunyan out here. Lemme get my bow and stuff and we can head out and everything will be like it was before.'" She made herself look at him because Natasha Romanov, aka Black Widow, was not a fucking coward. At least not when it came to her partner. "Which thread gets me there?"

He looked at her for a moment that stretched on. She could catch the briefest flashes of emotions on his face - grief, fear. It was only how well she knew him that she could see them at all. He was always the most perfectly composed person possible. He'd provided her a soothing steadiness for all the time she was trying to figure out who in hell she was. He could shoot arrows between his heartbeats. "That guy's dead, Natasha."

"Oh." She blew out a long breath and looked out his kitchen window at the lightening sky. She turned his words over in her head a moment, then nodded firmly. "That's a different mission then," she said, feeling lighter than she had in months.

The ghost emotions moved again, confusion and disappointment. His sigh sounded resigned. "Bought too many fruit cups?"

She shook her head and gave him a smile. "Probably not enough. I came here to bring Barton back. Now I gotta get to know the new guy." Wrinkling her nose was probably overkill but she couldn't help it. "New people," she added in an exasperated half whisper.

He laughed out loud - a real, honest-to-God laugh. She had no idea how long it had been since she'd heard that. "Do not fucking call me Boris."

*

When Clint opened the bar at 2PM, the town drunks were already loitering outside despite the cold. There wasn't a whole lot to do in this town, and his vodka was damn good. "Welcome, good morning," he said. "Ladies first." That got Natasha to smile at him as she ducked in out of the cold. Gary, Pete, and Johan lined up at the bar like patient communion recipients at a Catholic mass. "They sell alcohol at the store, you know," he told them as he poured four glasses. He slid one down to Natasha. She might worry when he drank, but he knew how much she could put away before she was got even the faintest buzz. She could drink it because she liked the way it tasted.

"She your girlfriend, Boris?" Gary asked.

He thought about all the curious men staring at her this morning, and about how much worse it would be after the mine changes shifts. He was really concerned she was going to make a mess he'd have to clean up. "Yes," he said succinctly. "You make sure that gets around." He looked at the three of them, and pointed at the bear head above him. The legend of its killing had made it Fairbanks, after all. "Understand?"

Gary saluted him with his glass. "Got it."

"Good." He walked around the bar to take the chairs off the tables. It would be quiet for another hour or so before the mine day shift wandered into town. They lived in temporary housing the company had set up just outside of town, but they came here to get drunk and make trouble. Or try, anyway. He was popular for his ability to keep a lid on the bullshit.

Nat started taking chairs down on the other end of the room, movements quick and efficient. She was either going to cause more trouble or help crush out what little he did have here. Probably a bit of both.

"Tomorrow, I'm going to make you help with the meat," he commented.

"I think we'd both end up disturbed by that," she said dryly, twirling the last chair in front of her before setting it down.

"Could just let you tend bar." He walked over to her. "I bet you'd get great tips."

She flashed a predatory grin that generally meant he was about to get a new scar. "I would love to tend bar."

"I missed you," he said, feeling grateful he suddenly felt comfortable saying that out loud.

He watched her blink and tilt her head in the quizzical way that meant she was sorting out all the possible ways to respond to her current situation. He was a little surprised when she finally decided on, "I missed you, too, Clint."

By three-thirty, the bar was packed with miners. She sat in the corner, mostly just watching in that way of hers. She'd probably have the secrets of everyone in town figured out by dinner. He poured drinks and discussed the extension the state had just added to the moose hunting season. People complained to him about rising gas prices and a blizzard that was supposedly coming in. The highlight of his afternoon was watching Natasha stop a brewing bar fight via strategic bending over and fussing with her boots. And, of course, the usual bitching about the mine.

"I'm telling you man - he just disappeared."

"People do not disappear. He took his money and went somewhere it's not -14 outside. Not everybody is cut out for it."

"That's just what the company is telling you. Frank told me the other day there was something fishy going on, and he was going to report it. And then, the next thing you know, he leaves. That's bullshit."

Clint rubbed the back of his neck. Not this again. He was not getting involved.

During the post dinner rush, Nat started bussing tables to help him out. He could have made a list as long as his arm of people who would have loved to see the Black Widow waitressing in a bar. She carried a tray with empty glasses stacked three high and didn't break a one.

She caught his eye during the lull after the rush. "What's wrong?" she asked in the tone that usually involved her fondling her holster. She wasn't wearing her hip guns, but her shirt was loose and long enough she could have one at the small of her back.

"Oh. Large mining consortium. Small town. Transient labor. Shenanigans."

Head tilt. He could write a dictionary of her head motions. "Your feathers are up."

"I feel strangely protective of this town." He ducked into the back to load the dishwasher, and she followed. "I'm not sure that a professional assassin getting offended that some company is handling their problems in a 'make you disappear' manner is logically sound, but there it is."

She crossed her arms on the counter next to him and leaned. Yeah, there was a suspicious, gun-shaped bulge at her waist. "I know my barometer for such things is skewed, but isn't corruption in a mining town pretty much traditional?"

"Corruption yes. Wet-work less so. Though they could just be sloppily covering up industrial accidents. I know the politics of this drill site are. . . special."

"Couldn't they just be heading for warmer pastures? High turnover, you said it yourself."

He turned towards her so she could see his entire face when he raised a skeptical eyebrow at her.

The smile she gave him bordered on smug. "Hawk in his nest. Doesn't miss a thing. Your feathers _are_ up."

He wondered idly if she had any idea how hot he found that damn look she was giving him right now. "At least you're not telling me I'm imagining things because I miss SHIELD."

"That's not how you operate. You've never been one to borrow trouble, I doubt you'd start now." The feral smile again. "That's my department." Which was totally untrue, but a persona she occasionally claimed and was comfortable with. He was the quiet stoic one, she was the redheaded spitfire. People believed it, and Nat liked lulling people with their own assumptions.

"I shouldn't get involved," he replied, already knowing he would, in fact, get involved.

Her expression indicated she knew it, too, and that the idea of two of SHIELD's top agents investigating a corrupt mine amused her. "Totally not worth your time," was all she said.

And yet, doing an op with her again - even a ridiculous and petty op - felt like the most natural and normal thing in the world. "Completely." He gestured at the dishwasher. "Much more important things to do."

She hooked a thumb over her shoulder towards the bar room. "These people aren't going to get themselves drunk."

He was silent for a full minute. "So you'll go get some intel?"

She shrugged. "Sure, you want me to go now or wait for the midnight rush?"

He considered. "You might have better luck at night after Joe takes over and I go home. People are wary about me."

"Later it is, then."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continued thanks to my beat SweetTea.

Drinking people under the table so they would freely share their secrets was a inelegant and amateur method, but on occasion, it was just the thing. Particularly in a place like this. It had left Natasha with the problem of four passed out miners on the floor of the bar at closing time. If she put them outside, they’d freeze to death, but she couldn’t just leave them where they were.

She found Toothless and his sled, flashed him some cash and risked frostbite to show a hint of cleavage, and got him to take them all home despite it being 3AM. Because apparently this town did, in fact, have a damned dogsled as its taxi service. 

So she walked home and let herself in the dark house. She moved as silently as possible, having no idea how heavily Barton slept these days — but she was certain he wasn’t used to company coming in at night. A surprise arrow in the eye would not be a fun time for all involved.

It was just as dark when she woke, but she smelled coffee. The house was empty and the coffee machine bore a note. _Had to go see about a wolf. Back by sunrise._

She was beginning to think Alaska and Russia had far more in common than she had initially expected. She drank her coffee, downed a yogurt, and dressed in an obscene amount of layers to go for a run. Her note read _Running. If I freeze to death, I'm coming to haunt you._

The cold air was painful as she ran. It reminded her of training as a child in the Siberian winter. Her run was shorter than it would have been in warmer weather, and as she turned back the sun - such as it was - finally peeped up over the trees. 

It started snowing, just a little, by the time she reached the house. A trail of blood in the snow stretched around the front of the house. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and she drew her gun. Not a lot of blood, and one set of footprints. She was already feeling a little foolish when she came around the side of the house and saw where it led, which was some sort of dead fox Barton had staked to the side of the house hanging off a long arrow. He was out there, too, splitting logs.

In the snow. With no shirt on.

She took a moment to just watch him. Those shoulder muscles moved like liquid beneath his skin. _Trapezius, deltoid, supraspinana. . ._ Nat tended not to have visceral reactions to anything. She had instincts, and usually listened to them because they had saved her life far more often than she'd liked to admit. But a blatant, primal, punch-to-the-gut reaction of hormones and need and want? That didn't happen. 

Except when Clint Barton took his goddamned shirt off.

Of course, there was no way on this or any other planet she would admit that. Certainly not to him. Not under any kind of torture. And Nat had a very long list of tortures she knew she could survive. So she holstered her piece and sauntered over to the woodpile. "You know, just because you don't feel cold doesn't mean you can't get frostbite," she said conversationally.

"I have gloves on," he replied, not losing the rhythm of the axe swing. She was close enough she could see the tiny scars all over the backs of his shoulders. In New York, he'd gone through a plate glass window and landed in the shards. That night she'd spent two hours pulling tiny pieces of glass out of his skin with tweezers because he refused to see the medics. "I think better with my shirt off," he added.

The axe went through the next log and she crouched to scoop up two more to bring him. "Find the wolf?" she asked.

He gestured at the fox. "I found idiots."

She set a new log on the stump for him and stepped back so she could watch him swing the axe. "I got some intel last night, when you're ready for a debrief."

He nodded. The wood split with a crack. "Go." He was, apparently, going to require her to talk to him like this.

She stifled a sigh. "Looks like this mine redefines the term 'high turnover rate.' They've lost six guys in the last couple months. At least two of them were lifetime hard labor types. The kind who go out fishing on the Bering Sea and come home and chop down trees. Not the kind to puss out and crawl home 'cause it got cold. Company never makes an announcement. Couple of the guys swear they've seen tunnels that aren't on the official maps and when they try to follow them, they don't get far before company employees armed with assault rifles show up and discourage their curiosity."

She put another log up for him while he contemplated this. He processed things in silence and you usually just had to wait. "I know there's been a mine here since the 1890's. For the last seventy years, it put out only just enough gold to keep it open. Since it was, technically, open, the company bought it with much less oversight. I'm pretty sure if they were mining for something - anything - other than gold down there, they'd have to start all over with the state and the EPA and. . ." He looked up at her. "Hence, shenanigans. It did strike me as too big an operation for the quality of the vein."

"Armed guards sure indicates something more interesting than gold," she agreed. "No high rates of illness, so it's nothing radioactive or poisonous. Still leaves a long list of alternatives."

"They mine a lot of things up here." He stopped and rested the axe on his shoulder, turning to face her. "I think that's enough wood." 

Oh, good Lord, that was just indecent. She had the strongest, insane urge to lick the ice crystals forming on his skin. _Stone face, Natasha._ "If I help you carry it in, can I have dibs on the shower?"

Something flickered in his eyes, and his voice seemed to have gone down half an octave when he rumbled a very quiet, "Sure."

The word hung between them a long moment and she had a feeling they were both thinking the same thing. _Shower's big enough for two and, hell, even if it wasn't, we're both creative and flexible._ She hid whatever might have shown on her face by bending to scoop up an armload of split logs. 

He didn't move, and she could feel him watching her. He made an exasperated noise, and it did occur to her that if they _were_ both thinking the same thing, perhaps that wasn't the best move possible. He'd joked once she could cause car accidents by strategic bending. He'd never even pretended he didn't look, and that was before, and without whatever the hell was going on right now.

Of course, he was spliting logs shirtless. In the snow. Like the cover of a damn romance novel. It was entirely his fault. And if that was true, then he had only himself to blame for the extra sway she put in her hips as she walked towards the house.

After she put her logs on the pile by the door, she passed him coming in with his small armload for the fire. She didn't meet his eyes as she went. Apparently she was, on occasion, a coward after all. 

*

It wasn't so much that Clint didn't feel any cold. He just felt less, and sometimes cold was good. Sometimes it was needed. But at this point, he was pretty sure he had overdone it. His skin hurt. He'd been just about to go inside when she showed up, and for just a moment looked at him like. . .that.

He yanked the water over to hot until steam billowed out of the shower. He'd stayed out there in the snow until he'd actually started to feel warm again, which was a sign of hypothermia. He rested his head against the tile shower wall and let the water warm him up. It would have been a worthy death. Death by frustrated lust and male pride. 

He knocked over one of her pink bottles of whatever while looking for his razor. Many a bathroom had been shared with her over the years, and she always managed to fill it with the girliest lady products imaginable. It had always amused him, and felt like a private secret, that she would own something with flowers all over the bottle. He popped the top and inhaled the scent - and then put it back because he felt ridiculous. 

_Soap. Brush. Razor. Don't cut yourself._

He came out into the living room fifteen minutes later in clean clothes, and with three nicks on his chin. When she looked up at him, he muttered, "Blade was dull. Strop's in the bedroom."

Her nod indicated she believed him or was going to pretend she did to keep his dignity somewhat intact. "I was going to make breakfast or brunch or whatever meal we're looking at right now." 

Nat was offering to cook; he must be in worse shape than he thought. On the relatively long list of things he knew about her that no one else did was that the woman had no palate whatsoever. She would eat filet mignon and Chef Boyardee with equal gusto. (She might actually eat the pasta with more gusto, given her unhealthy addiction to overly sweet kid food.) She had a very limited list of things she could cook that were edible to anyone else. Bacon, eggs, and toast were about half of it. You got your eggs scrambled or runny as hell, but the bacon was perfectly crisp and the toast dripped with butter. She only cooked when there was absolutely no other options or she was feeling a faint nurturing vibe. He had a pretty good idea which this morning was.

He made his way over to the couch. "I saw you bought some of that eggs-in-a-carton stuff yesterday. I feel brave."

She nodded and headed for the kitchen. He lounged on the couch and listened to the clatter of pans and her quiet footsteps. After a few minutes, he heard her start to hum, then quietly sing. A Russian lullaby he hadn't heard in a very long time. For a little bit, he just listened to it. She had beautiful voice, you could hear it in just the hum. Thinking about the past. Then he got up, and followed the sound to the kitchen.

Eggs product was cooking in a pan, looking enough like scrambled eggs he wasn't as concerned as he had been. Nat was hovering over the other half of the stove where she'd pulled out the grill attachment and was cooking two steaks. Right. No bacon. As he watched, she poked one of the steaks with a knuckle and took it off the heat. "You still like it rare?" she asked without looking up.

"Sometime I eat a hunk right off the carcass," he replied, and she rolled her eyes. "Careful, the caribou is very lean."

She nodded and moved the other piece off the stove before turning the fire off. She shook the egg pan and inspected it with a wrinkled nose before shrugging and turning the heat off that as well. Then she brought two plates to the table and went back for coffee. 

"No toast?" he asked.

"You don't have any butter." She put the coffee down in front of each of them.

"I have margarine."

That got him a remarkably imperious look for someone who ate spaghetti-os cold straight from the can. "Margarine isn't even food."

He stared her down. "Pass the salt."

She slid it across the table without breaking eye contact. She probably used a little more force than necessary but it was hardly the first time they'd turned brunch into a battle of reflexes.

The steak was perfect. The woman knew her way around fire, that was for sure. "So," he said finally.

She glanced up at him, chewing thoughtfully. She twirled her steak knife through her fingers a couple of times. "That was a very serious 'so.'" she said in reply.

"You did cook for me."

She glanced at their plates and nodded, as if he had made a very profound point. "We do need to eat."

They had long been able to pick up conversations that had been dropped days or weeks before, and carry on as if no time had passed. It was helpful in their line of work. "I didn't even notice people here staring at me. It wasn't half as bad as all the staring at SHIELD."

Her steak was mostly gone. He thought the eggs had a weird texture but she had eaten them all. She leaned back in her chair with her coffee cup. "We're in a whole new world, Clint. Not everyone is adapting to it well. And not everyone is as enlightened about brain-washing as I am."

"You remember when I fell out of that tree in Myanmar?" She'd remember. He'd broken his leg and she'd had to carry him through the jungle all the way to the Thai border.

"I started packing splints in my emergency kit after that."

"When I complained about that stupid traction thing, you informed me that 80% of femur breaks were fatal before its invention." _Here's how you could have died_ was how Natasha Romanov wished you _Get well soon_.

He took a sip of his coffee finally, and discovered it had a dash of vodka in it. For a split second he considered telling her he loved her.

He'd told Loki that.

"Anyway," he continued. "While I was laid up, I ended up playing a bunch of video games. One of them I figured out I could plant my tank on the top of a mountain and slowly pick off people I was supposed to fight hand to hand with one very, very long gun. My roommate in rehab loved to to tell me it was a sign I had issues." He lifted a shoulder. "But it was the only distance I could manage. That is my world at its most orderly. Silent, high up, far away. Very specifically not with every person in SHIELD knowing exactly who I am, and exactly what I did."

She didn't know what to say to that. He saw the flicker of uncertainty go through her. Her head tipped and he gave her time to process, sipping his coffee. "I was on television," she finally said. "Me and Steve, fighting the Chitatri. Some asshole with a camera phone. Sold it to the news and suddenly my face is on CNN. SHIELD squashed it pretty quick but it was enough. You can't be a spy if the world knows you're an Avenger. I'm still going on missions, but it's not the same. Especially without a partner to go with." She drained her coffee mug, then set it on the table and gave it a spin. "I know it's not the same, but-" She sighed. "I guess when I showed up, it felt like I was staring, too."

"Yeah." He watched her fiddle with the cup, and felt like he ought to get her a beer bottle to peel the label off of. When she was playing someone, she could be a still as a statue. But when her real emotions were involved, fidgeting commenced. "And you, you see right through me."

Her gaze flicked to his face, then back to her mug. "I played this wrong. With you. I thought you'd deal with it like I do. Throw yourself into something else until time has closed up the wounds. I forget that my life experience is not universal."

"You did a very good job trying to keep me busy." She had. Fury told them all to take some leave after New York. He'd said no - maybe because he felt he didn't deserve a break, not after what had happened. She'd said no, too. She'd backed him up when he bluffed through a psych eval and promised Fury he was fine. And she was generally the word of God on any given agent's mental state. They'd spent months in the field after that, moving from one op to the other, not pausing, not thinking, not talking. "Knife across the arm closes better than a gunshot to the chest."

She nodded slowly, not looking at him. "I think I deserved more than a note and eight months of silence." It was said in a pleasantly neutral voice. Which meant he was glad he could see both her hands. Nat didn't get mad. She didn't yell or rage. She didn't even get that low, dangerously clipped voice that some people did. When you went so far as to piss off Natasha, she turned to ice. And you never saw it coming.

When he was at his best, he knew how to handle her. In fact, he was damn good at it. But he was so far from his best it wasn't even funny. Which was kind of the point. He sighed, feeling weary. He hoped she didn't shoot him, but he really did want to try honesty. "I was really pissed at you, Tash."

Her fingers tightened on the coffee cup and he braced to catch it if she threw it at him. Of course, if she was going to do that he'd never actually see it coming, but maybe she was being nice and letting some tells show. Her jaw worked a moment. "Because I talked you into fighting?"

"No. That battle was the one good thing to come out of this." He watched her. "You used to tell me that you took a certain comfort in being your various personas. In slipping into someone else and getting lost in a different set of thoughts and problems belonging to this person you were pretending to be. You got to do that. I got to sit alone and listen to the running list in my head of all the innocent people I killed and try and find some way to shut it up long enough to steady my hands so I wouldn't miss and shoot the wrong person."

Another slow nod and long pause while she processed. No one could claim Nat didn't listen when you talked. "Does Boris help?"

"He did, for long enough for me to find a way to get some quiet again." He reached for her cup. "You want some more coffee?" Because he needed some more vodka.

With a snap of her wrist, she twirled the mug across the table so the handle fit right in his hand. Her gaze met his and there was a little warmth there now. "Might try it your way," she said quietly.

Two cups of Russian Coffee, coming up. When he returned with them, he set hers down in front of her gently. "The note should have contained more words," he said when he sat. "I'm just not good with them."

She shrugged. "We've always been succinct in our correspondence." She blew on her coffee, then sipped it. "You said he did help. Past tense." Her hands wrapped tightly around the mug and her gaze caught his. "Am I fucking you up again? I can be gone in an hour if that's what you need."

"No," he said, with way more force and intensity than he intended. She blinked, clearly surprised by the emotion in his voice. He had no idea what to say, so he decided to drink his coffee instead.

Silence stretched between them as they sat there sipping their coffee while fake eggs and grease congealed on their plates. Clint considered himself pretty good at reading her. He usually had a guess as to what path her mind was taking. In her own way, her mind was as complex as Stark's. What he did for machines and tech, she did for people and words. Conversations with her were usually so easy, like being a passenger in a car where the driver was a Rally racer. You might hit a bump or two but in general you were in good hands.

Of course, she tended to avoid conversations that involved her own feelings.

Finally, she broke the silence with the last thing he expected. "Six years ago. Baghdad. I'd just poisoned a Syrian dignitary and I had some American hot shot on my tail. Thought I'd lost him in the old, bombed out part of the city but when I turned around, there he was, standing on the wall of a burned out house, arrow pointed at my eye." She glanced at him. "You know the first thing that went through my head?"

He honestly had no idea. They didn't talk about that time. Maybe because it was before they were them. "Who the hell brings a bow to a gunfight?" he offered.

She pointed at him. "That was my _second_ thought. My first thought was 'Oh, thank God. I'm so tired.'"

He remembered. She'd stood there, looking up at him. She'd lowered her arms and waited. A long time they'd stayed like that, perhaps having the first of many, many silent conversations. The stupidest, craziest thing he'd ever done in his whole life was climb down off that wall. Perhaps the best, too. "How long before you weren't sorry I didn't kill you?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "Months." Head tilt. "Prague. We took out a terrorist cell. Good twenty people holed up in a rendering plant. I had two broken fingers and unspeakable shit in my hair and was thinking that at least when I worked alone, I did it clean. Then you came strolling towards me, yanking arrows out of bodies as you did. And you gave me this _shit-eating_ grin. And I thought, 'Okay. Maybe it's a little fun with company.'"

"Arrows are expensive." She complained a lot when he insisted on going back and getting them. "And it is," he said quietly. "Better with company."

"I want reusable ammo. I should get Stark on that." She sipped her coffee. "I just meant that. . . I've been there. Wherever you're at, I've been there. Tired and want to fuck the world? I've been there. Want to eat your gun? Been there. Putting the pieces of yourself back together and finding a bunch don't fit? Frequent flyer privileges to there. Running list of the dead people you've caused? Summer home on the beach there." She huffed out a breath. "My way didn't work for you. I should have seen it sooner but I didn't. So if I'm here - if you want me here. . . Then whatever your way is, I want to help. I've been in that hole and I don't want you stuck down in it, too." She gave him a little smile. "'Cause it's better with company."

"I want you here," he said. "There's still a lot of stuff I'm trying to figure out." He reached out and touched the back of her hand with one finger. "One of the only things I am sure I want is you."

Her eyes widened at that and he realized she had mascara on. Wearing the oldest pair of sweatpants he'd ever seen her in, hair damp and uncombed, in the middle of nowhere in Alaska she'd bothered to put mascara on. Nat used all kinds of things as armor.

She stared long enough that he was getting nervous. Then she slid her other hand over and curled it around his. Her fingers were warm and callused. "I'm here," she said quietly.


	4. Chapter 4

It was the first time he'd touched her.

Later, after he'd opened the bar and she was sitting at a table watching the crowd, she finally turned it over in her head. It probably should have been on her list earlier. For someone who didn't really like being around people, he had always been remarkably relaxed with his personal space for anyone on his short list. Certainly for a long time, he was the only person who dared to touch her. Small, casual things. He'd bump her shoulder or prop his foot up on her chair. Touch her arm to get her attention or inspect her minor wounds without asking. He was absolutely the only person who had ever survived licking their thumb and wiping dirt off Natasha Romanov's face.

She remembered when it made her wary, convinced he was up to something. He'd given her an exasperated look and told her not every man who touched her was trying to get into her pants, and that this was something that normal people did. Part of human behavior. And it did, eventually, make her feel normal.

It wasn't until right now she thought about how absent it had been. She wasn't sure what to make of that.

Frankly, the whole damn conversation had left her twisted up inside. It had probably been the longest stretch of time she'd just been _herself_ in a long time. She didn't know where the memory of Baghdad had come from. Why now, after all this time, she'd wanted him to know how close to the edge she'd been when he’d found her. Maybe it had been payment, in a way. He'd been honest with her. Let her see all the little cracks in his casing. There weren't just big debts in her ledger. Sometimes, you had to repay the little things as well.

Maybe she'd just wanted to feel like they were a team again. Just once more.

The crowd from the mine started to trickle in, then flood. Feeling antsy and claustrophobic, she got up and caught Barton in the dishwashing room. "I'm going to go check the mine out."

He smiled at her. "Don't get dead." After a pause, he added, "I wish we had comms."

"You hate the comms. You said you feel like you're on Star Trek." She put a hand to her head and added, "Captain, do you read?" in her best terrible Chekov impression.

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to aim at something that is flying around, from the top of a skyscraper in a Manhattan wind tunnel, with fucking Stark self-narrating his actions and cracking jokes to the computer inside his own suit?"

She stared at him a moment. They'd talked about New York before, briefly, in passing. That was possibly the first time he'd used something resembling a joking tone while doing so. That had to be progress, right? "I dug knives into an alien nervous system and steered an alien glider with it while he did it. I win."

He tilted his head. "Agreed. _Vaya con dios_."

Even that sounded. . . calmer than expected. She snapped him a little salute. "See you later. Don't wait up."

She stopped back at the house to suit up. The catsuit probably would have made waves at the bar, but generally wasn't practical for everyday attire. She really hoped she didn't need the full kit, but she put it on anyway. Guns on her thighs. One in her boot. One on her shoulder. Asp and garrote on her belt. Gauntlets on her wrists. She covered it all with her parka and headed out for the mine, keeping to the side streets and shadows.

Snow was the most terrible surface possible from which to launch a break in, but there wasn't a whole lot that could be done about that. The mine had so much traffic and people coming in and out that the whole vicinity was torn up anyway. For a while, she just watched the comings and goings, casing it for the best way in.

She didn't know much about mines. Did they even have back doors? They had to, nothing is stupider than a death trap with one exit. If this were a SHIELD op she'd have specs. Explosives. Five ways in and eight ways out. But it wasn’t a SHIELD op, it was a mine in the middle of nowhere and really, why was she even worrying about this?

There was a lull in traffic about three hours after shift change. After fifteen minutes of no one in or out, she got up from her post and slipped into the yard. A little bit of careful timing with the security cameras and she was in the tunnel, heading down into the dark.

Unsurprisingly, it was a maze down there. Thankfully, the mapped tunnels were posted all over the walls at regular intervals. Fire escape maps. Nice that the corrupt mining company cared about OSHA. She memorized one quickly, choosing an area that seemed to go pointlessly nowhere. If they were going to hide something, that's where it would be. People were predictable and generally _terrible_ at hiding things.

She had to take a brief detour to avoid a group of miners taking a break. She hung out around the corner in case they said anything interesting but it was mostly an analysis of the WWE fight that had been on the night before. For a moment, she stayed just to appreciate how very much they sounded like housewives discussing their soaps, then she hurried on.

The go-nowhere tunnel did not, in fact, go nowhere. It went to a haphazardly concealed hole that lead to a new tunnel that was most definitely not on the OSHA maps. It was much more roughly cut out, with gravel and loose stone on the ground and a ceiling that changed heights randomly. She snapped a glow-stick and shook it, lighting her way with the eerie green glow. The tunnel went down at a much steeper pace than the others had. She had a feeling that if an inspector saw this, someone would be getting a slap on the wrist and a strongly worded violations letter.

She came, eventually, to iron cage door that looked like it belonged to a Victorian-era elevator. It looked like a death trap. The door, however, was not very hard to pry open. She peered in and the shaft went far down. Very, _very_ far down. 

The cables started to move.

Two steps back took her into the shadows so she could watch the lift ascend. While she waited, she contemplated her life and how she had come to this point. That actually happened a lot on this kind of op. The big fights were too fast, too hectic to really _think_ about. She didn't have time to contemplate her mortality when she was planning how to take out five different guys with only three bullets and no reloads. No, it was those quiet pauses on the sneaky missions that made you think.

Mostly that she didn't want her obit to read: _Natasha Romanov, SHIELD agent and founding member of the Avengers Initiative, found dead in a pointless mine in butt-fuck Alaska 'cause Clint Barton couldn't leave well enough alone._

The lift reached the top and three men with automatic rifles stepped out. She could tell immediately they were not your average mining company security rent-a-cops. These were professionals. Military trained. Special forces, probably. One of them had gun handling that screamed Israeli Army. He was the one staring right at her in a combination of confusion and shock. 

Nat sighed and pulled her garrote out. Easy mission her ass.

*

Clint had gotten so used to being alone, that it surprised him how much he missed having her around. The house seemed empty when he got home. He'd hired Joe to take the evening shift a couple of nights a week so Clint could sleep and get up early enough to hunt in the morning. Tonight was one of those nights, but he really wished now he hadn't. 

He was worried. Like a mother hen. But she really should have been back by now. He was just debating going and looking for her when the door crashed open. He leapt to his feet, poised out of pure instinct, even though he could already see the familiar, unmistakable shape.

She slammed the door shut behind her and stomped past him. He didn't remember the last time he'd seen Nat stomp like a tantruming teenager. Her hair was mussed, she had a line of blood down the side of her face and fingerprint bruises lining the left side of her throat. When she reached his fridge, she yanked open the freezer and pulled out the vodka. He noticed she used only her right arm, left held stiffly at her side. She pulled the top of the bottle off with her teeth and tipped it back, glugging it down like it was water.

The bottle went on the counter and she reached back in the fridge for a blue liquid ice pack, which promptly went on her left shoulder. She nudged the freezer closed, turned, and leaned her butt on the fridge. "There is something fucked up going on in that mine."

He came as far as the kitchen doorway. When he felt certain she wasn't going to punch him in the face with her good arm, he reached over the sink for his first aid kit. He put some water on a washcloth and cleaned the blood off her chin. He tucked her hair behind her ears and searched for the source of the small trickle on her temple. It didn't look like it would need stitches, but it got a small butterfly bandage. Then he lifted the icepack to feel her collarbone and shoulder for breaks or dislocation. She was watching him but he didn't look at her. "Think I need to pop it back," he murmured.

The noise she made was kind of like a growl. She reached past him, grabbed the vodka, and took another swig. "Go," she said with a hiss.

He braced one hand under her armpit and gave her arm a swift, practiced yank. She sucked air sharply, and then breathed intensely through her nose for a moment, but otherwise made not a sound.

She took another draw on the vodka bottle, then pushed past him to the cabinet and dug out two of her fruit cups. She peeled the lid off the first, accepted the spoon he handed her without a word, and wolfed down the little cubes of fruit in a few quick moves. She drank the syrup, then tossed the can at his trash bin. When she picked up the next one, she seemed to have found her equilibrium and spoke. "Their security is hired mercenaries. Top level. Good guns, lots of training. Whatever the hell they're digging up there, it's worth a small fortune to protect it."

"I should have gone with you," was all he could think to say. He didn't like how much the bruises on her neck bothered him. He couldn't stop looking at them. Someone had tried to choke her. Absently, he rubbed the scar on his forearm where she'd bitten him during their fight on the helicarrier.

She shook her head, plowing through the second fruit cup. "No way to know, " she said, mouth full. "Seriously. Until they popped up, I was bored." She glanced at him. "Your instincts are still spot on."

His instincts were completely fucked up is what they were. Syrup was dripping off her lip and down her chin, which seemed an even better thing to stare at than the bruises. He didn't really care about the mine at this particular moment. He wanted to either wrap her up in cotton and keep her safe from the world, or kiss her until she forgot the rest of the world existed. Either way, it would be like wrestling a porcupine. 

Mine. Something about a mine. "Yeah, absolutely." It was a great generic answer for when you weren't really paying attention.

She looked up at him and her expression made him pretty sure that it had been the wrong generic response. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand and straightened up a little, no longer lounging on the counter. "If I'm boring you, I can tell someone else about the fucked up mine. Maybe the poor dead fox from this morning."

"Sorry," he said. "I think you just popped the cork on the bottle."

Head tilt. This was the "I didn't get that but I'm not sure I want clarification" tilt. He saw it a lot in the early days, when she was getting used to his humor and English idioms and all that. "You with me, Barton," she asked finally.

Well. If she was going to call him by his last name, they were talking business. "Yes. Sorry. Bring your fruit cup and sit and tell me about the mine."

The tension drained out of her and she nodded. He'd intended to head to the table but she headed out for the living room and the couch. She built a little pile of cushions, eased down against it with a sigh, and started telling him about the mine and the security and the tunnel to nowhere that was really somewhere.

He stoked the fire up, got her more vodka, and eventually convinced her to take some real pain killers. He coaxed her into stretching out on the couch and tucked a blanket over her. Then he sat on the floor beside the couch and opened her another fruit cup. He tasted one of the oranges experimentally. "That big shaft is clearly unauthorized. It's a big deal to dig a hole that deep. Permits, environmental impact, and seismic studies, especially here. Though I don't get why they're guarding it with guys that can, you know, beat up _you_. But what's more valuable than gold in a gold mine?"

"Lots of things worth more than gold," she muttered. She reached for the fork, stole it to eat the piece of pineapple he'd just speared, then handed it back. She left her hand on the back of his neck, like it was too much effort to reel it in. "Adamantium. Vibranium. It's a whole new world. Lots of governments would like to have Steve's shield even without a Steve to go with it."

"I like Steve," he replied. It was an inane comment, but now she was twirling his hair around one of her fingers. Her and her fidgety hands. Tomorrow he was going to shave his head. "Neither of those could be mined with with equipment you could get down that shaft." He offered her a piece of mystery fruit over his shoulder.

She leaned over to bite it off the fork but the noise she made when she flopped back was reminiscent of a grumpy toddler. Which meant the vodka and pain killers had kicked in and they were likely reaching the end of her productive time. "There's something we're missing," she said. Her fingers were still moving, now farther up his head, scraping his scalp with her short nails.

He decided to just give into it. Odds were very good she'd pass out soon, and it just felt good. Maybe a little torment. But mostly good. "We'll find it," he replied. 

All that got him was a sleepy sigh. When he risked a glance at her, he found her eyes closed, Only her still moving fingers and breathing pattern told him she was still awake. "Next time, you're coming with me," she finally mumbled.

“An alien army couldn’t stop me," he told her. Her fingers stilled, and she didn't move again even when he turned. He took the ice pack away and tucked her in with sufficient blankets. Everyone looked young and vulnerable when they slept, even her. He stood over her for some interminable time; thinking, wondering. He still didn't understand how she trusted him again, but somedays that was the only thing that kept him going. 

When he was absolutely sure she was completely under, he leaned over and kissed her forehead, thinking that was probably as close as he'd ever get. “This is one hole I’m stuck in all by myself," he whispered.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please welcome my writing partner Olive to AO3.
> 
> We both want to thank SweetTea for her awesome betaing skills.

Nat woke up stiff and achey on the couch, a small pile of blankets tucked around her. She sat up slowly, groaning and scrubbing her hands over her face. She had no idea what time it was because, as usual, it was fucking dark outside. The fire Clint had stoked had burned down to embers and he was no longer guarding her. 

She rolled her left shoulder and heard a faint click even though the movement was smooth and easy. Well, she was due for another cortisone shot when she got back to base. Her thighs complained as she stood but she ignored them as she went on a hunt for anti-inflamatories and a shower.

One shower and a fistful of over the counter ibuprofen later she felt like something approaching human. As close as she got to one the day after an ugly fight, anyway. She wandered to the kitchen, wolfed down two yogurts and a piece of bread, then kept roaming. It was five am; she was too wired to go back to sleep and too tired to do anything resembling exercise.

Clint's door was closed and she found herself loitering outside of it for a while, listening for any sign he might be stirring. Finally, she decided she'd earned the right to wake him up and knocked. Three raps, indicating nothing was wrong, but she had a question.

"Yeah?" he called from the other side. She opened the door. The crack of light from the living room fell on the foot of his bed-- which looked like a real one, and more comfortable than the foam thing in her room. The soldier sleeping happily on a wooden board mythos was bullshit. When you beat your body up as hard and as often as they did, sleeping on the best surface possible meant better sleep, which meant faster healing.

He would, however, position his bed in such a way that he could see the door but you couldn't get that good a sight line on him, so she had to come around some big armoire thing to squint at him in the dim light. He was braced on his elbows, shirtless-- of course-- watching her. "What's up, Nat?"

"Are you going hunting this morning? I need to shoot something." She didn't miss the vaguely hopeful note in her voice. _School is snowed out today, Clint. Can you come out and play?_

He scrubbed a hand over his jaw and yawned. Then he smiled at her. "Go put on a fresh pot of coffee."

She grinned and spun away, heading for the kitchen to do so. He came out just as the pot was done filling, in the black base layer of serious winter gear. It wasn't quite the gut punch of shirtless, but not a lot of people could pull off skin tight tech fabric quite that well. "Big thermos is above the fridge. I don't imagine you brought any winter camo with you on your wild goose chase?" 

The thermos was actually in the cabinet above the fridge. Clint occasionally forgot she was five foot three and couldn't actually fly. Damn if she was going to ask him to get it for her, so she put a knee on the counter and heaved herself up. "Jacket and hat. No pants, though. I packed in a hurry."

"I have extra. Though they will look pretty funny on you." He opened the closet just outside the kitchen. "I have a .22, a shotgun, and a crossbow. You can't hunt with a sidearm." She came over to look at his weapons closet. It also contained three compound bows of various sizes, a set of throwing knives, a ton of arrows, a box of explosives, and what looked like a Robin Hood era wood longbow that had to be taller than she was. 

She ignored the shotgun - not her style - and picked up the .22. After a brief inspection she put it back, not liking the feel. Which left her the crossbow. She hefted it, brought it up to her shoulder to check the sights and decided it would do. It had been a long time since she'd used one, but adding to the challenge might make this more sporting.

He had the thermos of coffee on the counter and was packing a backpack with some food. "Bolts are on the top shelf." She was kind of surprised he owned one, actually. Then again, no harm in backup weapons. "I can shoot it one handed," he added.

That explained that, then. She gathered up a fistful of bolts and closed the closet behind her. She went back to her room for her snow jacket and hat and discovered the bolts fit nicely in one of her thigh holsters. When she got back to the kitchen, she found the food packed up and Clint shrugging into his own camo. "Ready when you are."

"Snowshoes are by the door," he said. "It gets pretty deep out there."

And then they were off, trudging through the dark, snowy woods. It was so dark it was almost like being underground, but he seemed to know where he was going. He had the best eyesight of any person she had ever met, save perhaps the guy guarding the Asgard bifrost. For quite a while, they walked in silence. Then he said, "When I first came here, I used to stalk whatever I was hunting."

_Of course you did._ "Did anyone think you were a yeti?"

She couldn't see his face, but his shoulders turned so she knew he was looking at her. "I didn't do it in a ghillie suit."

"That's because you have no sense of the dramatic." She was pretty sure most of SHIELD thought her sense of humor was limited to snarky comments as dry as the Sahara. Which, to be fair, took up the vocal majority. Clint was the only one who knew her love of a practical joke. And by practical joke, she meant mysterious event that makes news b-roll for a couple weeks. Up until Thor and New York and Greenwich, the cause of most alien sightings was Nat "accidentally" mis-routing some SHIELD drone or another. At least until Coulson changed the codes on her.

He chuckled. "Eventually I gave in and did what most guys do, which is build a stand." He stopped walking, looked up, and then reached his arms above himself and pulled himself upwards. 'Most guys,' she imagined, had ladders on their deer stands. A moment later, an avalanche of snow came flying off from somewhere above her. She could see him dangle his legs over the edge of platform twelve feet up to take his snowshoes off. "Need me to come down and give you a boost up?" he called.

She narrowed her eyes into a glare and stepped back, studying the platform. Then she crouched and leapt for the nearest branch. A doctor of some sort at SHIELD had once told her she shouldn't be able to jump as high as she could. It was a biological impossibility. At least without super soldier serum or the like. She wasn’t entirely sure what they did to her in Russia when she was young and hungry so it was possible something like that ran in her veins. She didn’t think about it too much. Mostly when she and Barton were showing off.

Tree climbing, much like bicycle riding, was a skill that came back pretty quick. She joined him in the stand in a couple of seconds and tugged her crossbow off her back and onto her lap. "I'm good, thanks."

Her shoulder did ache just a tad. When she rolled it, she knew he noticed when he commented, "I'm a jerk."

"Yep," she agreed matter-of-factly. "But I'm a bitch, so we can still be friends."

He poured them each some coffee, and then set about inspecting his arrows. It surprised her he was actually pretty bundled up, given his apparent imperviousness to temperature. "How many?" he asked.

She sipped her coffee. "How many what?"

"It annoys me when you haven't been following the train of thought I've had in my head. How many did you trounce last night?"

"Oh. Three. There was three of them." She scrunched up her face, annoyed. Three guys normally wouldn't make her break a sweat. "Close quarters and none of us really wanted to use guns. I like having hearing in both ears."

"Dead or just out?" His breath was a cloud of fog mixing in with the steam rising from the coffee.

It took her a minute to think back, cataloging the list of injuries she was sure she'd inflicted, plus a few she was guessing at. "One's probably dead. The other two were out for the count but should've woken up."

"Just curious." He lifted a pair of night-vision binoculars up to scan the forest. "You know I worry whenever you're in the field."

She leaned against the tree and watched him. He did worry. He hid it well because it would embarrass them both if anyone else noticed. "You're still the only one who can sneak up on me."

"I know how to breathe at the exact same rate as you."

Her eyes widened. Six fucking years and she'd never figured that out. Of course he could do that. Of course he knew how she breathed. God knows she could pick his breathing out in a dark room. His gait, the sound of his bow drawing taut. The soundtrack of their lives together. "In a different context, that would be downright romantic," was all she said.

He lowered the binoculars and raised the his bow so he could look through that sight. "I just told you one of my most cherished secrets and relinquished a reliable one-up I've always had on you. Romanov, that is practically a marriage proposal."

She scooted forward to squint in the direction he was aiming. There was a very faint pre-dawn glow off to their left but it wasn't strong enough for her to spot anything useful. "I always figured a marriage proposal from your would involve more blood and the head of one of my enemies as tribute." She gave him a sidelong glance. "Rings are so common."

He passed her the binoculars. "Even if there's still a finger or hand attached?"

He's been tracking a caribou; it stood out starkly from the trees with the night vision. She tracked its path a few moments before handing the binocs back and readying the crossbow. "You can never tell when you'll need a spare set of prints," she admitted.

"Anyway," he said. "Now I have an new entry in your ledger."

"For the breathing thing? What, I owe you a secret now?"

He looked through the bow sight and made a grumpy sound. "He's behind a tree now. And yes. You do. Something tactically advantageous."

Tactically advantageous. That was a pretty short list on her best of days. She favored her right side when jumping? No, that was pretty obvious. Telegraphed her roundhouse? Shit, no, he'd pointed that out to her, once upon a time. Allergic to shellfish? Ha! He'd administered the epi pen. "I'm struggling to think of one you don't already know." She watched his arm holding the bowstring taut, unwavering. He was under too many layers for her to properly appreciate the muscles, but she could imagine. She had an excellent memory.

 She tucked a knee up and rested her chin on it. "When you're shirtless and you move your shoulders, my brain shuts off for approximately three seconds."

He released the arrow, though it looked more like his hand slipped than a deliberate action. She could see it go wild as it disappeared into the darkness. She'd never, ever seen him do that before. 

When he didn't look at her after ten heart beats, she asked quietly, "Did you hit it?"

He turned and gave her a look. "Pretty sure I scared off the caribou." He looked through the scope. "Yep. Going to go get the arrow. Don't shoot me while I'm out there."

She gave a little salute and watched him climb down from the stand. She followed his progress through the night vision glasses. Watched him yank the arrow out of the tree it had buried in. He stood there a moment, twirling the projectile between his fingers, before he started back towards her.

He pulled himself up, tossed the arrow in his pile, and leaned back against the tree. Their shoulders touched. "Ditto," he said finally. "Though it's not exactly your shoulders and it works through clothes."

It's not like she was surprise; tactical sexiness was sort of her thing. She could rate the wants-to-sleep-with-me level of every man (and most women) she worked with. Coulson never had. She'd gone from possible asset to surrogate daughter pretty seamlessly with him. Fury would but he'd spend it waiting for her to slip a knife in his ribs so it wouldn't be any fun. Stark would have, once upon a time, but now he was dedicated to Pepper so it was a no, but they could still flirt. Banner might have once on a Thursday when he'd had too much to drink but now he had a vague overprotective brother vibe regarding her that no one wanted to mess with. Rogers would, but it would take way more coaxing than she was willing to do and he'd just feel weird about it later.

And then there was Clint.

Clint would. She'd known that a very long time. And he was the only person that she felt odd about. The thing was, with the others, if they needed it - if it was a comfort thing - she could do that. Sex was a weapon for her. A tool. She could use it to heal a friend just as easily as she could hurt a target. But not with Clint. 'Cause he was _Clint_. He knew her too well. He'd actually give a shit about her and probably make sure she enjoyed it - like, thoroughly - and once he found out about that spot on her ribs that was ticklish then it was all over. So she put it aside and monitored her flirting and touching with him so as not to encourage or tease him.

Beside her, he sighed. It was an almost imperceptible sound, but she heard it. It was a little resigned, and a little sad, if one could interpret such a small noise. It told her that her guard was working - but that he knew it was there. That changed something.

"When I'm having a bad day," he said quietly, "I think about all the people that died because I helped Loki. From that poor curator in Germany to pedestrians in midtown right on up to Coulson. All my fault."

For a moment she let herself picture what she would do if he wasn't Clint. If he was one of the others, sunk low and hurting. She pictured Banner, for some reason, because Banner has probably been this low a time or two and because he and she had seen some shit together, in their own way. With that in mind, though still well aware who he was and what she was doing, she reached out and slid her hand into his, weaving their fingers together. "It wasn't you," she said quietly.

They both had gloves on, but she could feel the warmth through the fabric. "On better days, I get it down to the people I actually killed with my hands. People I remember killing. And if I'm having a really good day, I can even forgive myself."

She thought about repeating herself but decided against it. She knew first hand how little it helped. She squeezed his hand tightly. "What kind of day are you having today?"

"The very best kind," he said, though his voice was lower, harsher. "I believe it wasn't me, about nearly everything. Everything except that I tried to kill you."

She looked at him in surprise. "You didn't try to kill me. If you did, I'd be dead."

"You're far better at hand-to-hand combat than I am. You've put me on my back before. I couldn't control myself, but I _remember_. I was trying to kill you. Shit, I held a knife to your throat. I had every intention of cutting your carotid artery and watching you bleed out all over me." The roughness, the catch in his voice, was almost painful to listen to. 

She sat up, turned, and straddled his legs so he had no choice but to look at her, because this was _important_ , dammit. She won't deny he has a long fucking list of things to regret but he doesn't get to add this one to it anymore. "Yeah, you had a knife to my throat. And I held you off. I may be better at hand-to-hand but Jesus, fuck Clint, you're an archer. You're biceps with legs. I may be able to flatten you nine times out of ten but you can arm wrestle me without paying attention." He was watching her now, intent, like he wanted to believe her and was scared to.

"First rule of fighting," she said. "Between a person trying to kill and a person trying to injure, the one willing to kill always wins." It really was the first rule she'd learned, years ago. "I sure as hell wasn't trying to kill you. We're both sitting here now because we were both holding back. Simple as that. We know Loki's control wasn't one hundred percent. Selvig had enough will left to put in a backdoor to the portal. And you held back fighting me."

He reached up, tracing the side of her face with his fingers, then his hand plunged into her hair beneath the hat. He curled his fingers behind her neck and pulled her closer, until her forehead rested on his. He whispered, "I need to believe the one thing I would never do, _no matter what,_ is hurt you."

She slid her arms around his shoulders, hands flat on his back. She remembered the fight very clearly. The big knife at her throat, locking her arms with his and pushing back with all the strength. It hadn't occurred to her at the time, because higher reason wasn't really engaged while in a fight for your life, how easy it should have been for him to bring that blade down those last couple of inches. She'd realized it later, watching him sleep off the blows to the head. It had a big part in her undoing those restraints as quick as she had. "Seriously, Clint," she said quietly. "We can reenact it with a stick later. There's no way you were giving it your all."

He gave a very short laugh, of astonishment and relief. "Shit." There were tears in his voice, and it cut through her, right to the bone. His fingers pressed on the back of her neck, and he whispered her name just before he kissed her.

She melted. She didn't think she'd ever done that for a kiss before. His mouth was warm and surprisingly soft. He tasted like cinnamon toothpaste and coffee and winter air. She counted six heartbeats, which was about as long as you could kiss and still call it casual. When the kiss stretched past that and she didn't have the urge to move away, she gave a mental shrug and gave into him. Her fingers tightened on his back, one hand sliding up to bury in his hair, knocking his hat off.

He wrapped his other arm around her to pull her closer. She'd lost her hat, too and her hair was loose. She couldn't observe or plan or even think. She was a mess of emotion, and that had never happened before either. Kissing didn't make her feel. She stayed one more second, took one more taste of him, before pulling back and scrambling off his lap.

She stared at him, breathing hard, absolutely speechless. When she met his eyes, the same expression was reflected back at her. "Natasha," he said finally.

There had to be something she could say. Something dry and flippant. Possibly about the satisfying sound his head made when it hit the catwalk rail at the end of that fight. But her walls were in pieces, her personas scattered to the wind. Only he could strip her down to the naked core like this. He was the only one who really knew who she was without the Widow to hide behind.

She looked away from the emotion in his eyes and waved a hand at him, begging him in a gesture to leave it be.

Silence stretched between them for a long time. The sun was coming up. They sat so long it got appreciatively lighter. Slowly, he started packing up.

She found her hat and shoved it back on her head, then gathered up her crossbow and leapt easily down to the ground. She looked up to see him standing on the edge of the stand, lit by morning sun, bow slung on his shoulder. For an instant she was back in Baghdad, in a ruined building, looking at her death.

_Oh, thank God. I'm so tired._

Her second thought had been something derisive about bows and guns. But her third thought had been to observe, with the detached appreciation for beauty of a museum curator, that he was by far the nicest looking spy to ever come after her.

He swung down, landing like a cat, watching her with the same cautious expression. Offering her the same surprisingly gentle smile. It didn't quite reach his eyes, this time, though. "We don't ever have to talk about that again."

Two separate and very distinct urges warred in her then. The first was to nod, offer a brittle smile, and walk away, heading towards the house. It would take a little while to get her walls and screens back up, but she'd manage it. Everything would be the way it was.

The second was to wrap her arms around his neck, _scale_ him, and pick up where they'd left off.

With a struggle, she tried to find a happy medium by reaching out to touch the back of his hand with one gloved finger. She gave him a soft, apologetic smile. She still didn't know what to say, though. He held out her snowshoes. When she took them, he finally said, "Sorry you didn't get to shoot anything."

She looked down a moment then back up at him. "Feels like it was a productive morning, anyway."

He took a deep breath, and let it out. "Thank you."

She rubbed his hand lightly, then let her arm drop. "Come on. I'll make you breakfast."


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to SweetTea for her leet beta skills.

If he was honest with himself, Clint would admit he thought about kissing her on a semi-regular basis. He didn't put a lot of thought into what would happen afterwards - but it had gone pretty much like he expected, her panicking and him promising to pretend it ever happened. At least she hadn't kicked him in the head.

Now he was standing on a chair fixing a busted light fixture, watching her tend bar out of the corner of his eye. She had an amazingly, distractingly low-cut shirt on. It got her ridiculous tips and made it hard for him to think. 

He _had_ to kiss her while she was wearing a parka instead of that shirt, didn't he?

It was good he was staring at her a few minutes later when the door creaked open and three big guys he didn't recognize walked in. He watched Nat notice them. Then she turned very deliberately to put her back to them and caught Clint's eye. She rapped her knuckles on the bar, two double taps, their knock for "I've got unpleasant company, would you be a dear and shoot them for me?"

He'd gotten out of the habit of wearing a gun. He felt safe and off-the-job here, but now he really wished he was armed. Well, he did have a knife. And a toolbox. There was a shotgun behind the bar; he was sure Nat had already seen it. In an effort to not start a stampede, he turned a large screwdriver up against his palm, and hopped down off the chair with enough noise to get their attention. "Welcome, gentlemen."

It succeeded in getting their eyes on him and not Nat. He watched her reach under the bar, he assumed for the shotgun. Probably her least favorite type of gun, but he'd never known her to be picky in times of need.

The tallest guy studied him carefully. "You're Boris." He had an Eastern European accent and a very impressive shiner, complete with a burst vessel in the eye staining the white red.

"And you're in my bar," he replied. "You sound far from home."

He shrugged. "Home is where the paycheck is," he replied. He pointed a long finger at Nat, who was the picture of innocence, watching the big boys talk, arms pressing on her sides to make her cleavage positively epic.

Clint shifted the screwdriver to his left hand, and hovered his right over the pocket containing his knife. "Any particular reason you're pointing at my girl?"

The guy's jaw worked a little bit. "Your girl was seen trespassing at the mine last night." They had started to attract an audience, drunks looking up from their beers to watch the show. "Could be we've got some questions to ask her."

"Her?" he asked incredulously. "In the mine?" He moved carefully, subtly herding them so the door was clear for his patrons to flee when this got ugly.

"Wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. When both my eyes were working," he added with a murderous look at Nat. To Clint's relief, she kept her blandly innocent face on instead of antagonizing anyone. She was almost vibrating with the tension of not punching people, though.

Slowly, he slid his knife from its sheath. "Everybody out," he called. "Bar's closed."

Almost as one all the drunks stood up to head for the door. In the brief moment of chaos, the guy he'd been talking to reached for a knife of his own and charged Clint. The one closest to Nat reached for her and she sidestepped him neatly, bringing the shotgun up. 

Clint danced back from the blade the man swung at him. He was almost surprised. Was this guy really trying to have a knife fight with compromised depth perception? He ducked another swing and kicked the knife out of his hand. The crack of a breaking wrist was a satisfying sound. To his left, the shotgun went off. He didn't know if she'd hit her target, but he did hear her yell, "Fuck! This is birdshot! What the hell is wrong with you?"

Goon #3 came at him with a chair, which he caught and used the momentum to hop up on one of the tables. He kicked it towards them while jumping back onto another table. He could see her behind the bar, smashing a bottle over the head of the man back there with her. He staggered, blood now running down his face from multiple lacerations on his scalp. Nat actually rolled her eyes when he stayed upright and used the shelf below the bar to jump up and catch him around the neck. That brought him down and they disappeared behind the bar.

Number Three had recovered from his brutal introduction to the table and now had a pool cue aimed at Clint's knees.

He couldn’t dodge it completely, but he did manage to move so it hit him across the thighs - which still hurt like a bitch. Broken Wrist moved towards him out of the corner of his eye, and Clint hit him with the other pool cue just to keep him back and give him a chance to sink his knife into #3's leg. Blood spurted back at him, and then something hard hit him on the back of the head, making him stagger.

He turned enough to catch a glimpse of Broken Wrist swinging the pool cue at his head. Before Clint could even start to react, there were two wet sounding _thunks_ and Broken Wrist stiffened. He staggered a step and Clint saw two knife hilts buried in the merc’s back and Nat standing on the bar behind him, a third knife in her hand.

They stood there staring at each other. He reached down and pulled his knife out of #3's leg. Blood spurted upward like a bad slasher movie. There was no helping a sliced femoral artery out here, anyway. He wiped the knife on his pant leg, but it was bloody too. Then he bent down and rifled in Broken Wrist's pockets until he found a cell phone. He scrolled through the recent calls and found only one number. God love mercs with burner phones. He dialed it, and waited until a man picked up. "You failed. Come get your bodies out of my bar, cleanup the mess, leave me and mine alone, and I will consider not putting an arrow through your eye socket."

The voice on the other end sputtered, "Who-?"

"Call me Hawkeye," he replied. "For reference, google the Battle of New York." He snapped the phone shut, and tossed it down on top of the body.

When he looked up, he found Nat still on the bar, breathing hard. She'd stowed the last knife, but she was watching him with an expression he'd never seen on her face before. At least, not directed at him. It was very close to her "I'm going to kill you" expression, but softer somehow. And sexier.

He stalked towards her. When he got close to her, he reached up a hand to help her down. She didn't need it, but she took it. She stepped lightly from the bar to a stool top to the ground. She still had that look on her face. "We should be gone when the clean up crew get here."

That was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted to lift her up on the bar and peel off that shirt - and then everything else. Finish what he wished they were starting in the woods. But not here, not now. Maybe not ever. It settled like an ache, worse than the one in the back of his head or the bruises on his legs. The way she was looking at him made him want things he couldn't have. "Yeah," he said. "Let's go home."

*

Natasha expected the rush she felt to fade as they walked home in the snow; like taking a cold shower. Surely by the time they got inside she'd be sane again. The adrenaline would wear off and she wouldn't be thinking the things she was thinking.

She was thinking about the kiss in the woods.

She was thinking about how easy it was to fight beside him, communicating without words.

She was thinking about shoulder muscles and the ripple of skin.

She was thinking about standing up after snapping a man's neck and seeing the guy who'd choked her about the smash Clint’s skull in with a pool cue. She'd gone to the cool, calm center inside of herself and the next thing she knew, she was standing on the bar with her last knife in her hand, picturing tearing her partner's clothes off.

She was still thinking all of that when they got back to the house.

He stopped in the tiled entry after closing the door. They took their wet boots off, and then he said, "I don't want all the blood in the house." His voice was gruffer than usual. "You can have the shower first," he told her as he efficiently stripped off his pants and t-shirt, leaving him in nothing but gray boxer-briefs. 

That didn't help her thoughts. 

She peeled her top off and tossed it on the pile with his. Her bra, an impractical demi cup that she’d still managed to anchor a sheath to, was miraculously blood free. Clint headed deeper into the house, not looking at her as she shoved her jeans down her legs and stepped out of them. 

This was her moment of truth. Head for the shower, run it ice cold, and maybe get herself off on her futon later. And in the coming years, she could ponder what might have been. Or, give into her thoughts and see where that road lead, terrifying and thorny though it was.  
 She'd read a poem once that talked about how each life had a ghost ship that took a different route from the one you lead. She liked the idea, imagined she had dozens of those ships, sailing out in her past.

When she reached the living room doorway, Clint was almost to his door. She took a breath, leapt for her ghost ship, and crossed the room at a sprint, grabbing his arm.

He turned, and then she was in his arms. His mouth came down on hers, hot and hungry. There was no gentleness in this, no caution. It was nothing but raw need. He backed her up until she bumped against the table behind the couch. The lamp fell to the floor with a crash. He lifted her onto the table and she wrapped her legs around his waist. Then he lifted his head and tugged on her hair - apparently he had quite a grip on it - so she looked up at him. "Why?" he rasped.

Very good question. She couldn't blame it on the adrenaline; this was hardly the first time they'd been together in the wake of a fight. “You took your shirt off” was too glib; he deserved honesty. “I don't know” wouldn't satisfy either of them. She thought about a kiss in a tree, a pool cue, and a knife in her hand.

"I've seen you in someone else's cross hairs a thousand times," she said, voice almost unrecognizable, thick with emotion. "Tonight's the first time it scared me."

He let go of her hair, and held her face in his hands instead. She could feel the desire and desperation in him. It was practically a vibration. But for a moment, he was tender and careful. "Tasha," he whispered. He kissed her, like nobody ever had before. It was that kiss that took her across the Rubicon.

There was a tiny part of her that was sort of panicking at the current state of affairs. Emotions didn't belong with sex, and she was feeling a whole mess of emotions. She locked that frightened part behind a solid steel door in her mind. She'd let it out later, maybe. Right now, all she wanted was him. The taste of him, the feel of him. Just him.

The kiss started to deepen, desperation seeping back into his touch. She opened her mouth to him, sucked his lip between hers. She had her arms around his shoulders, fingers clutching at his back and she clenched a little harder, letting him feel her nails. The wicked calluses on his fingertips made her shiver as his hands moved up her spine. Slowly he popped the hooks on her bra, one at a time. Then he broke the kiss to lean back and look at her. One corner of his mouth lifted. "This is one of those $400 bras, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is. Were you thinking of destroying it?"

"No, no," he said, gently peeling the straps over her shoulders. "I just want you out of it. Out of all of your Black Widow trappings."

He tugged the bra off and tossed it aside. She caught his chin on her finger and lifted his head so he saw her eyes. "Widow's not here right now, Clint," she said softly. "It's just Tasha."

"Good." He cupped one breast in his hand, and she watched his thumb move over her skin. He was studying her, drinking her in. "Right now, I'd tell you things I didn't even know."

She laughed and tipped her head forward to rest it on his. His hand felt amazing on her skin. When his thumb grazed her nipple, she shuddered and closed her eyes as it tightened almost painfully. She found his mouth blindly, kissing him again.

Then she was pressed against his chest as he lifted her up off the table. He carried her back into his bedroom. With a detour to bump into both the door and the armoire. Something else crashed and broke, but they kept kissing. Up against the armoire he paused to run his hands along her thighs, over her ass. She felt him grip the edge of her panties in his fists. "These I'm thinking of destroying," he growled.

"Go," she whispered. "I buy 'em by the six pack." She bent closer to bite his ear as the sound of ripping fabric reached hers. He groaned and thumped her against the wood, just a little. She could tell he was holding back on her, keeping something leashed - but only barely, and less every minute. Cool air touched her center, then his impossibly deft fingers.

Air hissed through her teeth and she dug her fingers into his back as his slid through her folds. She could tell how wet she was already and the feel of rough fingers cranked the desperation she was fighting right up to eleven. He explored her as if he had all the time in the world. She was close to biting him again - and this time she'd mean it - when he finally brushed her clit. Her hips bucked and she almost arched right out of his grip. 

"Easy, honey," he told her, his voice rumbling beside her ear and straight through her. He swung her around and down onto the bed. He braced over her on one arm, not pinning her down. She was rooted nonetheless, held there by the slow, steady circling of his thumb. He busied himself kissing various random spots on her skin. A rough scratch of stubble and a warm mouth on her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her breast.

She dug her hands into his hair, deciding right then and there she preferred it long and he was never allowed to cut it again. The Black Widow was nowhere to be found right then. She was careful and precise, allowing her partner just enough time to feel comfortable before turning the tables on him. At this point, Tasha wasn't thinking about anything. She had her eyes closed and head tipped back, focusing on his touch. And a small, girlish part of her thought, _He called me honey_ , and a new curl of pleasure tightened in her.

She felt his teeth on her nipple, and it was enough that a gasp escaped. He kissed her navel, pushed her thighs further apart. She smiled, letting her nails scrape his scalp. This was a rare pleasure. Sex for gain involved far more of her doing things to. . . The rest of the thought vanished, shattered, under the warmth of his mouth.

He was really very good at this. The thought might have concerned another woman, sparked a hint of jealousy. She, on the other hand, was more than happy to benefit from whatever practice he'd had. His tongue traced complicated patterns on her, sometimes light, sometimes firm. He would drive her up, close to release, then slow again, letting the heat building inside her cool to a simmer before building it again. Until she was digging her heels into the mattress and cursing at him in Russian in her need.

The mattress shifted and his shadow loomed over her. He'd stopped, and she considered murdering him for doing so. She could do it, too. Where were her knives?

They were nowhere, of course, because she was naked. They both were, in every way possible. She looked up through her desperate haze, and found him watching her. She reached up and cupped the back of his head, tugging him down and stretching up at the same time so she could kiss him. She tasted herself on his mouth and groaned. She wound one leg around his thighs, just under his ass, and tugged him close, so the hard length of his cock slid against her slick folds. His shudder was very satisfying. He pulled back and thrust into her. 

She gasped and leaned back to look at him. His eyes were stark and intense in the dim light. She looped her other leg around him and hitched herself closer, so he bottomed out inside her and there was nothing between them, not even air. The smile she gave was somewhere between tender and triumphant. He returned it, and they spoke without making a sound. He laced their fingers together and pressed her arm to the bed beside her head. His eyes held hers as he started to move.

It was a level of intimacy she'd never experienced before and would have thought would terrify her. But, like so much in her life, Clint was different. She moved her hips in counterpoint to his, making adjustments to the angle until he stroked her perfectly. Her fingers flexed in his, tightening and relaxing as pleasure began to build again, hot and aching, low in her belly. She caught her lip in her teeth and her breathing changed as that heat grew. 

Just when she didn't think she could take any more, he dipped his head down, offering her privacy to surrender, to break. "Let go," he rasped in her ear. "Let go, Tasha. I've got you."

She heard herself whimper, which was not a noise she associated with pleasure, but that was how far gone she was. She closed her eyes and arched into him, taking a deep breath of his scent. Salt and leather and smoke and the spicy, earthy scent that she associated only with Clint. The knot of heat inside her frayed and snapped and she let go, just as he'd commanded. Her fingers clenched on his in the same rhythm as tight inner muscles gripped his cock. She whispered his name, over and over, mindlessly, as pleasure flooded and ebbed inside her. It was intense and all consuming and for a few moments she was utterly lost to it, with only him to cling to. She trusted him to hold onto her as long as she needed. 

His body tensed, and shuddered, just as she came back to herself. He always did have rather amazing and perfect timing. He held himself above her, breathing hard. She untangled her hand and reached up, cupping the back of his head and bringing it down to rest on her shoulder. She pressed her cheek to his temple and listened to their hearts pound, almost in sync. His weight pressed her into the bed, and he nuzzled her neck. Then he rolled them so he could wrap his arms tightly around her.

She draped an arm across his chest and tucked her leg between his, perfectly content to be held. That, too, was a new experience. She dropped an idle kiss on his chest. "Thank you," she whispered.

"That was perfectly mutual," he murmured. She could feel it rumble in his chest as much as hear it.

"No. Well, yes, but I meant just-" She made a helpless little gesture with her hand, unable to find the words to describe what she'd felt a few moments ago. She sighed and kissed his skin again. "Just, thanks."

He stroked her back, and they were quiet a while. She could almost hear him thinking. "Tasha? have you ever. . ."

She tipped her head back to look at his face. "I can think of three probable and five unlikely ways to finish that sentence. Please narrow it down for me."

He took a breath. "Sex without the Widow."

The arm around her back had tensed up when he spoke, like he was afraid of her answer. She wondered idly which response worried him more. She nuzzled his shoulder a little, then said, "No."

There was more silence. She sensed he was getting more comfortable in the quiet again. "Thank _you_ ," he said finally.

She shrugged a little. "I like being just Tasha with you," she admitted.

He kissed her hair. Her emotions battered against the steel door, but she was so exhausted. From the fight, from the sex, from eight months alone. He hummed something to her, the tune of a Russian lullaby. He couldn’t really carry the tune, but it was close enough. She reached down to the end of the bed and tugged the quilt up over them, then resettled on his shoulder. She closed her eyes and let exhaustion and the lullaby send her to sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eternal thanks, as always, to awesome beta SweetTea.
> 
> Thank you for all the comments. So glad you're enjoying this.

Clint had just made the most profound and important discovery of his entire life.

It was dark, but it was morning. They were half awake and tangled in the sheets. Natasha was still and tense against him. Like she was waiting to see if he'd noticed. Deciding if she was going to punch or possibly stab him. 

He held his breath, his fingers still against her ribcage, prepared for any reaction. "Nat. Are you _ticklish_?"

He was pretty sure he heard her say, " _Fuck_ ," under her breath before she answered more firmly, "No. I'm not. Move your hand before you don't have it anymore."

"I could sell this secret on the black market," he said. He stroked the spot again, and her whole body flinched and twitched.

"God dammit, Barton." She swatted at his hand before catching him and twisting, pinning him to the bed. She hadn't even tried to break his wrist, so she couldn't be that pissed. She delightfully dangled the world's most magnificent breasts in his face while she was at it, so he was a happy man.

"You are naked in my bed; do not Barton me."

"If you want me naked in your bed again, do not tickle me," she retorted. She let his wrist go and draped herself on his chest, chin pillowed on her folded hands. She looked at him solemnly a moment. He was a little concerned about where her mind was going - he was enjoying snuggly Tasha - until she said, "You totally could sell the information, though."

He sighed extravagantly. "Just makes for more people I'd have to shoot."

"Oh, please. Like I'd leave any left for you."

He sifted her hair through his fingers. "There was a time I'd have gotten seven figures out of Stark."

"Only seven?" She smiled and her lids drooped a little as she leaned into his hand. Tasha liked petting, duly noted. "I'm going to have to let her out sooner or later," she murmured.

He knew. "I wouldn't be here if I didn't like her."

She sighed deeply. "I have a lot of things I'm repressing right now. Everything I pushed aside to grab your arm last night. About the future and what happens next and what this means. I think I might freak a little when I finally let myself think about it."

"I am intimately familiar with that sensation." If he thought too long about certain things, it still made his heart pound and bile rise in his throat. He also knew her, better than anyone. He knew what an impossibility last night had been. He warred between telling her they couldn't put this aside like a kiss, and wanting to prolong the moment while he had it, the one where he could tickle her.

He let his hand roam downward, cupping her ass. "In the mean time, could I interest you in a shower?"

She made a noise that was almost a purr before she slid off of him and sauntered, naked as a jay, towards the bathroom. He sat up and enjoyed watching the entire walk before getting up and following her. Then he got to watch her lean into the shower and turn the water on. He fisted his hands so he wouldn't touch her, lest they not get anything resembling clean. "So I was thinking," he said finally. "About the mine."

She looked at him over her shoulder. "Really. That's what you were thinking about?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Would you prefer I recited baseball statistics?"

"I'm even more skeptical you have baseball stats memorized." She reached in to test the water temperature. "What about the mine?"

He studied the curve of her spine, the dip of her waist, and the swell of her hips. "We have to go back there."

"Considering they're sending thugs after us? Yeah, I'd say we do."

She got into the shower, leaving him to follow. He watched her dunk her hair under the water. "Blowing it up would be viscerally satisfying, but it's never empty of miners."

"Wouldn't answer the question of what they're doing in there, either." She reached past him for her shampoo and he was convinced she rubbed against him as much as possible on purpose.

He took the bottle from her and poured some into his hand. "You always have the froufiest smelling stuff possible."

She leaned into his hands as he rubbed the shampoo into her hair. "Just because I know eighty-seven ways to kill a man with a spoon doesn't mean I can't smell nice doing it."

"You do generally smell divine." He turned her face up for a kiss. When she slid her arms around him, he murmured, "You're distracting me."

She captured his lower lip with her teeth and tugged. "Were you trying to focus on something?"

"Washing your hair." There was something else, too. God, she was delicious. Her fingers were tracing little patterns on his back as she continued to kiss him.

"Are you up for an op?" she murmured against his mouth.

He tipped her a little so the soap would rinse from her hair. Bubbles trailed down her back and he let his hands follow them. "Whatever did you have in mind?"

She smiled and he could see a little of the Widow creeping back in. "The mine. I want to see what's at the bottom of that shaft."

Not yet, he thought. She was still his right now. "Sounds like fun." And the thing was, it did. It felt normal, and he didn't even dread it. The fear that had been following him around since New York was finally easing, just enough.

She was studying him and he realized that's what she'd been looking for, why the Widow had surfaced. She'd been gauging his reaction to the idea. Whatever she heard in his voice or saw in his face seemed to reassure her. He could almost see Tasha reassert herself as she stretched up to kiss him. He felt her leg wind around his hip and she hauled herself up him, hand burying in his wet hair. He turned, lifting her, pressing her against the tile wall. "First things first."

It was fast and rough, their skin slick from the shower spray. She left a mark on his shoulder with her teeth and he was fairly certain he bruised her thighs with his grip. But when she shattered in his arms, she whispered his name again and it was just as sweet as it had been the first time.

He rested his forehead on the cold tile while they caught their breath. He had no idea what prompted what came out of his mouth then. "When Loki had me, I couldn't lie to him. And among the many things he asked me about everyone, he'd asked me how he could most hurt them. He asked me how I could most hurt you."

She rested her cheek on his hair. "I know," she said quietly. "He sort of implied that in my interrogation."

"I recommended he kill me." He lifted his head, leaned back enough to touch the fading bruises on her neck. "And vice versa, if he was curious."

She lifted a hand and touched his face, cupping his jaw in her palm. Her eyes were dark and distant. He didn't know exactly what had been said between her and Loki, just that she'd done her usual thing and gotten his plan out of him, little though it had helped. Based on her look now, he didn't think he wanted to know what Loki had threatened her with. "You've been under my skin a long time," she said quietly. "I know that. I'm telling myself this doesn't make it worse but I'm not sure I believe it."

His arms were sore from the fight and starting to ache, so he set her down gently. "Look at me," he said, and when she did, he added, "There is _nothing_ about this that is worse."

Her expression softened into uncertainty, until she looked very young and oddly fragile. But she managed a shaky smile for him before tipping forward to rest her head on his chest. "Okay," she said.

He held her until the water turned cold - at least until it got cool enough for her to shiver. It was hard for him to tell. They got out and he wrapped her in a towel. "Come on. I'll make you breakfast, and we can plan our op."

*

Whomever Clint had found on the other side of that cell phone had followed his instructions - though they didn't really clean up the blood all that well, and there was the matter of the broken furniture. Still, the bar was a great space to plan in. He taped up a "closed for repairs" sign on the door, bolted it, and they got to work.

"Are the natives going to get restless without their drinking establishment?" she asked from her spot sitting on the bar. She'd sketched a map of the mine on the cracked mirror behind the bar with a dry-erase marker, and was studying it. He was scrubbing the floor.

"I put a case of booze on the porch. They're afraid of me." He pointed at the bear head on the wall. "They won't abuse it."

She glanced up at the head. "Is there more of a story to that than 'I saw a bear and happened to have a bow with me'? Was it attacking orphans or something?"

He waved a hand. "It was behind me and I hit it without turning." He tapped his ear. Clint had hearing like bat, so good he seemed to be able to locate things like sonar - though he claimed it was mostly because aiming at a distance was 90% math anyway. His ability to do that kind of math in his head was, on occasion, handy. 

Perhaps his generally extraordinary senses were some kind of superpower, too.

"You can see how that kind of thing spawns. . . talk. That I have eyes in the back of my head. Also that I can see in the dark, which isn't really true." 

"It's what let me find you," she said, stretching up to change a line of the map. "Story made it to Fairbanks. I figured using the name Boris might mean you were willing to see me."

"Only you." He rocked back on his heels, reached behind his neck to pull his shirt off over his head. Well, that was delightful. "Fuck, arterial spray is messy."

She watched his shoulder muscles shift for her allotted three seconds. "I think I'm going to put that on a sampler. Maybe a throw pillow."

The brush went into his bucket with a plop, and he turned and stretched. He did it so slowly she got the distinct impression he was showing off. Which was fine by her. He came around behind the bar for fresh water, dropping an absent kiss on her shoulder as he went. "You keep looking at me like that we're never going to get anything done."

"You're the one with his shirt off," she said. "I'm being very serious over here. Drawing maps. Plotting."

He leaned back against the bar and crossed his arms, looking up at her map. "We can assume that they've fortified that tunnel. There should be secondary access that was dug for the installation of that elevator and the boring of the shaft. They could have closed it, but people are lazy." He bumped her shoulder. "We go in there. Shut down the elevator and rappel down."

She nodded. "No way to know how much security they have in the bottom. Probably twice as much as they did a couple days ago. Plus there might be civilian miners." She blew out a breath. "Close quarters, underground. It'll be just like Cairo," she finished with a grin.

"Actually like Cairo or like New York was like Budapest?" He looked over at her. "I am not wearing a burka this time."

"You worked that niquab and you know it." She bumped his shoulder this time. "Tonight, then?"

He stepped in front of her, pinning her against the bar. He traced the edge of the neckline of her shirt with one finger, clearly fishing for what would be the _fourth_ round of the day. It had taken them a while to get out of the house. Six years of pent up attraction took a while to work out. "We should probably go home and take a nap so we're refreshed," he said innocently.

She chuckled low in her throat. "Are you actually planning to get any sleeping done?"

He grinned at her. She honestly couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him look that happy. Years. Before New York. Before Thor fell out of the sky. He slid his hand beneath the fabric. "We'll run out of steam eventually, right?"

Arching into his touch was almost instinctive. "I don't know. We've both proven to have a great deal of stamina." She flattened her palm on his chest, then slid it up to curl around the back of his neck. "Pity there's this mine stuff getting in our way."

He cupped her waist and lifted her up onto the bar. "Nonsense. Fighting with you is the best sort of foreplay."

*

"This is not at all like Cairo!" he shouted as he ducked a hail of bullets. The sound was deafening in the tunnel and she saw him wince. Her ears rang, but it did get to their opponent as well - so much so he dropped his gun and put his hands over his ears. The arrow that poked out of the back of the man's neck a heartbeat later was quite satisfying. 

Clint strolled over and said something over the body. She still couldn't hear, but she was pretty sure it looked like, "Now, that is how you shoot someone in a tunnel."

She hid a smile, bending down to retrieve her knife from another guard, dodging the blood spray easily. She joined Clint, rubbing her now ringing ear. Oh, good, hopefully no permanent hearing loss. She gave him a heated look before stepping past to disable to elevator. "Well, they know we're coming now," she said, probably a little too loud.

"Send it -" he cleared his throat and lowered his voice. "Send it all the way to the bottom." He was busy setting their rope lines. He leaned out of the shaft opening long enough to shake a flash grenade at her. "This'll help when we get down there."

She tucked it on her belt and crouched, ripping out a bunch of the wires underneath the elevator controls. He held her line out to her and she clipped the belay onto her belt as well. She gave him a questioning look and a thumbs up. He leaned in to give her a quick kiss, and then disappeared down the shaft. Her cheeks heated but she smiled, blew out a breath, and followed him down.

As one, they dropped onto the top of the elevator. He opened the hatch at the top. Someone on the other side opened the cage, and she tossed the flash bang. He dropped the hatch and they both shielded their eyes. The chorus of shouts when it went off was useful in gauging how much resistance they'd have. He opened the hatch and they both slipped through. 

The fight with the handful of dazed guys in front of the elevator was easy - he picked off two of them before she even crossed the doors. After a moment, the corridor was empty.

"See?" she said. "Cairo."

He plucked his arrows out of the bodies. "If I get felt up by some lecherous Egyptian militant at some point tonight, you're sleeping on the couch." He frowned at a bent arrowhead. "I miss the ones with the poison."

"Why did you stop using those?" she asked, liberating a rather nice looking Glock from the belt of one of the mercs. Nat didn't believe in letting perfectly good guns go to waste.

"I just don't have any up here. Up until you showed up, I ate the things I shot." He sighed fondly. "There's somebody at SHIELD that makes a lovely non-lethal dendrotoxin. Probably could have used that on a bear." He cracked the door to the next corridor and apparently found it clear, as he waved her in. "Can't think of her name. There's a pair of them, they're British and both look about nineteen. The other one made that crazy arrowhead I used to short the helicarrier's computers." She saw him stop, and make a face she couldn't read - and not a good one. But then he rubbed his temple and shook it off. "It's really fucked up to have memories that are both yours and not yours."

She prowled down the corridor in front of him. "Honey, I could write you a play about that." She peered around the corner and found it clear. She waited a moment, listening for any sounds. One would think there'd be some sort of auditory evidence of mining being done. A wave brought Clint to her side. "This place is kind of eerie."

He rubbed his ear, as if he thought maybe he was still deaf from the gunshots. "I think there's something up there." Slowly they moved forward, until they came to another door. This one was solid metal, and had a palm-print scanner on it. How out of place, given the elevator and the general 'architecture', if you could call it that, up to this point. He sighed deeply. "I'll go back and get a hand."

"See? You never know when you'll need one." She grinned widely at his expression as he walked back down the hall. 

He returned a few minutes later with said appendage and slapped it onto the reader. There was a buzz and she tried the door. It opened easily and Nat peeked around it to assess the room.

It was a huge cavern. She could hear water running somewhere, and the space was full of stalagmites and stalactites protruding in every direction. It looked like an alien world.

Which was good, because sitting in the very middle was a large alien ship.

From behind her, Clint muttered, "Aw, shit."

Her sentiments exactly. She slipped through the door and waited for him to follow. "Why can't it ever be something normal?" she asked idly.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to the best beta ever, SweetTea.
> 
> I will likely be increasing the frequency of updates on this. We're in the home stretch. :)

The snowmobile they'd taken out to the mine was too loud for any conversation, which suited Clint just fine. He knew what she was going to say - again - and he didn't feel like hearing it. It was much nicer to just drive and pay attention to the feel of her body pressed against him. He only had a reprieve for as long as it took him to get home, though.

"We're not calling SHIELD," he said as soon as he'd killed the engine.

She climbed off before he had a chance to turn. "Clint, there's a spaceship in a cavern in Alaska. This is what SHIELD _does_."

He unstrapped his bow and quiver from the side and climbed up. She was right and he fucking knew it. "This is my town and I don't want them here." He tossed the cover over the snowmobile - he'd take it back to the bar later. 

"It's not like they're going to set up a base here," she argued, following him towards the house. "It'll be in-and-out. That's how they do these things." She paused, watching him. "You don't have to be here. Go on walkabout for a couple days, I'll tell them I came across it when I was looking for you. They'll buy that."

He squinted at the sky. "There's nowhere to go. And there's weather coming."

She threw up her hands in a very un-Nat way and headed inside. "Then hide in the house and I won't say a word. It's not like it'll be Fury and Stark. They send the B-teams for 084s."

He followed her, leaving his boots by the door. She was already getting out the vodka. "Aren't you AWOL?" he asked. 

"I'm off the books," she said, taking a pull of the bottle before offering it to him. "Fury knew what I was doing, couldn't officially sanction it but agreed to cover my ass."

He took a long drink. Maybe if he drank enough, he wouldn't have to think about what came next. "I'd bet that doesn't extend to ignoring an 084 because I asked you to."

"What do you want to do, Barton? Just leave it there for someone else to trip over?" She held his gaze, but she was all Widow just then. "You know where you rank with me even without-" Her mouth thinned and she took a breath. "Some things I can't negotiate on."

He loved her because she let him entertain the idea of not doing what he knew they had to, just for a little bit. But he didn't tell her that. He put the vodka bottle down with a satisfying thunk. "Call them."

She blew out a breath. "Thank you." She stepped forward and kissed the corner of his mouth. He had a glimpse of a stunned, perturbed look on her face when she pulled back. She visually shook off whatever had bothered her and she went to her room, presumably to make the call.

Well, that could have been worse. With the storm, it would take them a day or two to arrive, anyway. He walked over and peered out the window, seeing the snow already coming down. Despite the op, and the rather, er, active day they'd had, he didn't want to be still. He longed to run, or hit something. He'd just started feel steady. It figured, didn't it?

The best he could do was the pull-up bar bolted over the kitchen doorway. He smiled a little as he reached for it. Given her mood she'd probably be pissed at him if he didn't leave his shirt on.

He was on fifty-three when she came out of her room. She'd changed out of her ops wear and into sweats and an old flannel. She stopped at the fireplace and loaded up the hearth to stoke the blaze. She crouched there, contemplating the flames but he caught her glancing his way a few times. He dropped to his feet. "On their way?"

She nodded slowly. "Said with the weather it'd take a couple days. Didn't say who it'd be, though."

"What did you say about me?" He walked toward the bathroom door, hoping a shower might clear his head. But he wanted to hear her answer first.

"I didn't mention you either way. Figured the snow delay would give us time to decide how to play it." He liked that they were still "us" at least. "I can't always turn her off, Clint," she said. "I mean, I don't actually have dissociative disorder. Sometimes. . . sometimes I'm just the Widow. And I don't know if that's okay with you."

Maybe he'd have the shower later. He walked back toward the fire and sat on the couch. "You know I can tell when you're handling me, right? All relationships contain a little manipulation - total honestly would lead to chaos and heartbreak. In our case, probably murder. I like that you do it so deftly I can keep my dignity intact, even when I'm being an ass." He shrugged. "And this has been going on a lot longer than I've seen anything other than Black Widow." It would be a confession if he didn't think she already knew. "I like seeing her sometimes. It's you at your most magnificent."

She kept her back to him, still crouching in front of the fire, utterly motionless. "It bothered me," she said quietly. "I kissed you just now and I don't know if it was because _I_ wanted to or because she was rewarding you for agreeing." Her muscles were very tense. He'd seen her sit stock still like that before and she had never looked tense. "I associate her with things I don't want to apply to you. Last night was scary, but I liked it. What happens when I go back to work? When the Widow has to do her thing? I mean, it's been a while since I actually had to follow through on the tease but I can't go in thinking it's not going to happen. Men pick up on that." A beat. "Some men."

It had all come out of her in a rush. Her tone had been calm and thoughtful, but the pace had bordered on panicked. It was, again, very un-Nat. He supposed it was a little flattering he could rattle her this much. Nothing caused Natasha Romanov to panic like real emotion.

The last thing she probably wanted was for him to get in her personal space, but he did anyway - because he always did. He slid off the couch and sat on the rug in front of the fire beside her. It was made from the hide of the bear whose legend had brought her to him. "That's actually two separate issues, Tash." He reached out but didn't quite touch her. "I can answer the second very easily, but it's not going to matter if you can't sort out the first."

A few minutes passed and she didn't move. Finally, very slowly, she eased from her crouch to sit properly, knees tucked up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. "I've never done this before," she said. It wasn't exactly a confession, but it was obviously important for her to say it out loud. "I think I can keep her out of the bed. Or shower, or wall, or table." She gave him a sly glance at that. "Maybe I can learn how to. . . share you."

He reached out, peeling one of her hands off her knees so he could tuck it in his. He couldn't stay out here. He was going to have to go back - face Fury and the rest of SHIELD and their hundred suspicious eyes. He didn't think he could do it, but he didn't think he could bear to watch her leave. So he brought up something they had never discussed. "Do you remember when I was transporting you back from Baghdad, and we got stuck in that empty house?" He waited for her to sigh and nod. "I had you cuffed by one arm so you could eat. We got talking. You did your thing with all your amazing skill." He smiled. "In my report, I noted I thought you intended to use a blow job as a cover to fish the keys out of my pocket. I didn't mention you had my pants unzipped before I realized what you were doing." If he didn't know better, he'd swear her cheeks were a little pink. It was the probably the heat from the fire. "I never told you how I figured you out."

She turned her head, resting her cheek on at knee to look at him. "Are you going to tell me now?"

"Yes. I am relinquishing all my tactical advantages." For them, it was almost a declaration of love. Certainly it was one of surrender. "Though I actually wouldn't want to hold this one. I am one of those men who can tell whether a woman is willing to sleep with me. I can also tell if she _wants_ to. Whatever reasons you had that night, it wasn't because you wanted me."

He watched her process that, in that methodical way she had. It was good to see that the frantic had ebbed enough for her to do that again. "I was always rather impressed at how you could consistently resist me. You're not the only man who ever has, but it's an awfully short list." She leaned towards him so their sides pressed together.

He gave a short, rueful laugh. "I wanted to. It had been a long time, and you are. . . you know, you. Strange for a professional assassin to have a moral code about sex, but, apparently, I do. Just willing isn't quite enough."

"It explains a lot. I always liked that about you."

"The point being, all I was going on was instinct back then. Now I know exactly what you look like when you're turned on. The way you breathe, your heartbeat. How your pupils dilate, how your voice changes, even how you smell. I know you want me. That's enough. Regardless of which of your shades is currently driving the bus."

She nodded and gave his hand a squeeze. "And when I'm working?"

"I do not own your body, Natasha."

Her head came up at that and she looked at him, surprise evident on her face. Very slowly her mouth quirked up into a half smile. "I have a dilemma."

He raised an eyebrow. "Tell me and perhaps I can help."   
"I really want to jump you right now. But we appear to be sitting on a bear skin rug. Sex on a bear skin rug might be a cliche too far, even for me."

That made him laugh out loud. Then he stood and pulled her up in one motion. "Thankfully there is a couch right behind us."

She wound her arms around his neck. "How very convenient." She gave a little push and they tumbled backwards. He absorbed her weight as he hit the cushion. Then she straddled him, and yanked her shirt over her head. It made him decide that her like that, in the firelight, was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. She grinned at him and popped the top button on his pants. "Not going to stop me this time?"

"Honey, not for all the tea in China."

*

The wind was howling outside, the storm working itself into a full blizzard. Natasha stretched out on top of him, head on his chest, the blanket she'd tossed on the couch yesterday keeping her warm. They'd been laying in silence for a long time. "I have an addendum," he murmured.

She sighed in content. "I'm feeling generous. Go."

"I don't generally need to know about your professional activities, unless you feel like sharing. The exception is if you end up in a situation without a condom. Our lives are too dangerous for us to pass the clap back and forth out of petty embarrassment."

She kissed his skin. "Agreed. Though I generally insist on them. At least since I started working for SHIELD. Guy refusing just gives me another reason to kill him."

"Good. And I will assume you are making an exception for me and not putting arsenic in my vodka." He sifted her hair through his fingers. "Not that I would have refused. I just don't have any."

"You are an exception to a great many of my rules." In reaction to that, he made a humming noise she could hear the smile in. The conversation was light, but it slowly sunk in that the topic wasn't. They were discussing the bounds of a relationship. The kind that was expected to last. The kind that meant going back home and integrating it into their lives. The alternate possibility hadn't even come up. Earlier they'd talked about it as it might be. Now he sounded like he felt it was a done deal.

She let the silence stretch a little, his hand stroking from her hair, then down her back. "You're coming back." She'd meant to pitch it as a question, but it hadn't come out quite that way.

His hand stilled, and his body tensed. His "Yes" was unsteady, but unequivocal. He didn't want to, but he would.

His heart was pounding under her ear. She slid a hand back and found his, twining their fingers even though it put her wrist at an awkward angle. "I've got your six," she told him.

He pressed his face into her hair. "I know."

"I will absolutely stab people who look at you funny." Her tone was deadly serious and she honestly wasn't sure how much she meant it. She knew how to stab people non-lethally. "You can make a list. With appendage suggestions."

She felt his chuckle, and he was relaxing a little. "I used to have nightmares," he said, sounding more conversational than she expected. "I wonder if they'll come back."

This, at least, was expert territory for her. "They will," she said quietly. "But not as often. And they'll change. New things will filter in. You'll learn to cope with some of it. Eventually you'll see the signs that make them more likely, then learn how to mitigate them. Company helps. Drinking might. Crushing your enemies and seeing them driven before you helps a lot."

"We did do some excellent enemy crushing." He moved their linked hands so they were more comfortable. "I never said how much I appreciated you all letting me shoot Loki. I know it didn't really do him any harm, but it felt good." For various degrees of 'let,' anyway. Thor and Stark had allowed Clint to be the one holding a weapon on Loki when they arrested him, in case he tried anything. Nat had known that the very moment they had shackles on Loki, he was going to let that arrow go. Thor had made a face, Steve clapped, and she and Stark had rochambeaued for who got to yank it out.

"Picturing Loki chained to that street light with Thor's hammer on his chest while we got shawarma has chased away a lot of bad dreams," she admitted, chuckling at the mental image, as always.

He returned the laugh. "Fury yelling over the comm, 'You are not bringing him back on my boat.' Loki looked like a pinned beetle. And then Steve fell asleep in his food."

The giggles were starting to take over. "Thor eating the poor restaurant owner out of lamb. Then Stark insisting he'll pay for the food then trying to use a credit card when the whole street was destroyed and the power’s out."

"Fuck it," he quoted, doing a surprisingly accurate Stark impression. "I'm Iron Man. Just send me the bill." She started shaking with laughter. "Then Banner tosses a pile of hundreds on the counter. Shrugs and says the the money was in pants he stole from Stark's closet."

She rolled off him, landing on her ass because she was laughing too hard to catch herself. She grabbed his arm. "Oh, God. You haven't been to the tower. Stark fixed everything, all the structural stuff. But the two holes Banner put in the floor? He fixed the tile but he left the holes. So there's these two divots in the floor. And in between them is a plaque. And in the fanciest fucking script you have ever seen it says 'Puny God holes.'"

He laughed and shook his head. She'd taken the blanket with her to the floor when she fell, and she took a moment to admire just how nice he looked naked. And she'd seen plenty of men without their clothes on. 

He leaned over to pull her back up onto the couch. "How can I have good memories - funny memories - of such an awful day?"

She tilted her head and gave him a gentle smile. "It's how you survive awful days. It's not the first time we've done it. You and I have made whistling past graveyards a professional sport. Pretty sure Stark is in the running for bronze. Christ, Clint, we fight aliens and have a green rage monster on our side. How are we supposed to take that seriously?"

"I suppose my guilt doesn't like me enjoying myself." He tucked her back into the blanket and his arms. "When you hijacked that flying thing and were driving the alien, and Loki was following you, I made a perfect shot. Then he fucking caught it. He gave me the smuggest look possible. Which was when I triggered the explosive, and blew him out of the sky." He rubbed her back. "That was pretty damn awesome."

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die, nor does it cease to be serious when people laugh." She looked up at him. "We saved a lot of people that day. _You_ saved a lot of people, up on the rooftop telling us what was going on where. It wouldn't have worked so well without you. You don't have to let go of guilt to feel pride. Or humor."

He sighed and stretched forward to kiss her. "I will take that under advisement."

She pillowed her chin on her hands and wrinkled her nose. "I'm a very wise woman, you know."

He watched her, and his eyes grew serious. "Tasha," he said quietly.

Oh, dear. She braced herself for what might be coming, but kept her voice light. "Still me."

He searched her face, looking like he wanted to say something. But then he clearly changed his mind, and his face cleared. He smiled. "What do you say we move this to the bed?"

She weighed her options and decided to leave it be. This was still new, six years history or no. She wasn't the only one in new territory. "I like beds," she agreed, sitting up. "Your bed in particular."


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sick at home with a sick kid and making myself feel better by posting fic chapters.
> 
> All our love to our beta SweetTea.

The blizzard went on through the next day, burying them in too much snow to even open the bar. Clint was perfectly happy with this particular set of circumstances, as he and Natasha were well able to entertain themselves. He was pretty certain this particular pace was not sustainable over the long term, but it was fun as hell during the time being. Particularly when their conversation came around to how they were both very athletic and acrobatic people. Perhaps they could get creative.

"You tell anyone where this came from, and I will make you very sorry."

Having to stitch your lover's forehead after a sex accident probably wasn't a usual feature in most relationships. "Maybe it won't scar. Hold still," he said as he sterilized the needle.

"This is as still as I hold when someone is driving a needle into my flesh," she told him in a growl. That was patently untrue; he'd seen her sit rock still for way worse than this. But Tasha punished him in her own way.

"You called me a pansy for flinching when you de-glassed my back." He stitched it as quickly as possible. He put a bandage over it, and kissed the bandage.

"I believe my exact response was to punch you in the shoulder and say 'Two for flinching,'" she corrected mildly before leaning forward to kiss his mouth. "So, next time we try that move, we're putting pads down."

Next time. That made him grin. "Agreed."

They cleaned up the first aid stuff and grabbed their preferred snacks from the kitchen. "We should probably do something other than fuck today," she said while poking at her fruit cup. "Do you have any board games?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Who would I play them with?" He paused. "I think there's some stuff at the bar. I have cards." He paused. "Though I'm actually still a fan of fucking all day. We won't have this kind of time at home."

Only Tasha could make eating a fruit cup sexy. She arched a brow at him as she sucked on the fork. "Did I tell you we each have our own floors in the Tower?"

He got up to look for the cards. "He's naming his floors?"

"It's Stark, of course he is," she spoke louder so he could hear her in the other room. "Yours has an archery range. Mine has a training room which I now realize will make an excellent sex acrobatics room. And you should see the reinforcements they put in Banner's."

Startled, he turned all the way around. "Wait. I thought you meant like people name conference rooms. He's building us living quarters in his building?" He rubbed the back of his neck, thinking about the crappy apartment he used to have. And trying desperately to hold back his suggestion that they could totally share a floor.

She tossed her empty cup to the trash. "He unveiled them a couple months after you left. Not everyone stays all the time. But he said if we were a team then we were a team and everyone on on Tony Stark's team deserved the best." She slanted a glance at him. "Yours is right below mine. I punched Stark for the immediate innuendo he made."

"So would you be mad if I had him install a ladder up to the sex room?" 

She groaned and covered her eyes with a hand. "God, when we're all there, I'm going to be living in such a frat house."

He finally located the cards. "Speaking of frat houses. . .would now be an inappropriate time to suggest a game of strip poker?"

Her fingers opened and she peeked through at him. "I'm going to kick your ass, Barton."

*

He was dreaming about New York again.

Chitari coming in from every direction. Tracking them, counting, angles, watching the wind, listening to that high-pitched hum they made. They were easy to find. Staring at the giant armored creature, thinking he had nothing to touch it. Hearing people scream, glass breaking, explosions going off, watching it all from above. He made it happen. All of it. He couldn't see for a moment in the smoke. So much smoke.

Too much smoke. 

He jerked awake to the smell of smoke. _Real_ smoke. His house was on fire.

His fingers closed around Nat's shoulder and she jumped, then started coughing. His eyes met hers through the haze and they both moved, yanking on clothing, keeping low to the floor. He got sweatpants, his gun and his knife, and checked she had enough clothes to brave the outside. He opened the bedroom window. "My weapons closet," he said urgently. There was enough ammo and explosives in there for a very big boom, just as soon as the fire got to it.

He saw her eyes widen. She glanced briefly at the door, probably thinking of all her stuff in the other room, then scrambled towards him and climbed out the window ahead of him. She was already sprinting for the trees when he got out, feet sinking in the deep snow, slowing her down. He crashed into her, tackling her to the snow when the explosion went off. Tiny bit of burning wood and shingles and embers showered around them.

They lay in the snow a moment, then she lifted her head and twisted to look at the wreckage. "Well, shit."

He rolled off her and sat up slowly. In his concern for her, he had gotten neither shirt nor shoes, and even he had to admit his feet were cold. He drew his gun anyway and scanned the now very well lit landscape. He didn't see anyone; they were either gone or dead. "Why do I think this wasn't an electrical fire?" 

She did a push up, flowing easily to her feet. "Clint, I think it's possible we've made some people angry."

"I would have to agree." He watched his house burn and sighed. "It'll burn itself out, and there's nothing nearby. We should go to the bar before we freeze. I think I have some extra clothes there."

She was already hugging herself and hopping a little for warmth. They trudged through town to the bar. Nat set up some shots for them as he dug in the back room for clothes. He returned to her sitting cross-legged on the bar, sipping vodka from a shot glass. "At least the worst of the storm blew out," she said, holding her hand out for the socks he offered her.

"Yeah." It took an effort not to limp, as his toes were totally numb. "So," he said casually, "What does one do for frostbite?" He watched her look down and notice he had no shoes on.

"Jesus, Barton." Her tone was more exasperation than concern, which was reassuring.

"Cold doesn't really bother me anymore."

She hopped off the bar and shoved him into a chair, crouching to inspect his toes. She was muttering in Russian, which was never a good sign, but when she finally addressed him in English she said, "It's not frostbite yet, we weren't in the snow long enough. I'll get some warm water to warm your toes up."

"Thank you." 

And so that was how he ended up sitting in one of the chairs in the dark bar, soaking his feet in his dishpan. She made him put on both a t-shirt and a flannel shirt, and plied him with vodka. He didn't complain, because the warming hurt like a bitch. "Don't start a drinking contest," he said. "You know I'll lose."

She looked fairly ridiculous in a borrowed sweatshirt and a pair of his socks hanging off her feet. She'd probably kick him if he said that, though. "But you're such a cute drunk," she protested.

He slugged back another shot. "I'm already feeling confessional."

"I am shocked to find you've been holding out on me like this."

He reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear. "I'm really glad you called SHIELD."

Her face softened into a smile. "Really?"

"Yes, really." He refilled her glass. "Drink. This would really be much worse to deal with if I didn't know the cavalry was coming. This is now serious."

She knocked back the drink. "I think you're just looking forward to living in the Avengers' playboy mansion."

He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles. "I would go live anywhere you were."

He knew she'd kill him if he mentioned it, but he was almost certain her cheeks were pink this time. "It's nice," she said quietly. "It's kind of like a messed up family. But I could never settle, because someone was missing." She squeezed his hand. "I'm glad you're coming back."

"So I am I." He flexed his foot experimentally. "I think the water has worked. Can you hand me the towel and socks?"

She got up and went to bar. She tossed him a towel and brought the socks back, tucking herself back into her chair. "Hopefully a crew will show up in the morning. Do you think Stitch Point will make it without you?"

That made him chuckle, and then he actually thought about it. There was going home, and then there was going home tomorrow, which is what would be happening. "Maybe I'll give Joe the bar. I don't imagine I'll be back." She was watching him now, her brow creasing a little. "I keep a couple sleeping bags here. People have been too drunk to drive snowmobiles and I let them crash on the floor. Let me see if I can find us a spot to get some sleep."

She nodded and he felt her eyes on him as he went to the back to fetch the bags. They settled in the bar corner, near a heat vent and away from the doors. She zipped the bags together with a tease about sharing body heat before wiggling inside.

He sat up with just his legs covered so he could finish his vodka, and she rested her head on his thigh. He stroked her hair and they were quiet for a while. "They blew up my house," he muttered.

She made a little sympathetic noise. "I'm too tired to punish them tonight, honey. Let's do it tomorrow."

He nodded, and thumped his head against the wood cabinet behind him. He'd thought he was tired and now he wasn't. He felt unsettled, out of sorts. Maybe it was about the house, maybe it was about tomorrow. Maybe it was everything. "You can sleep, I may be up a bit."

An eye cracked open and he felt her hand curl around his thigh. "You okay?"

He should just tell her she could sleep. She was exhausted. So was he. But he doubted she'd do it, anyway. "Was dreaming about New York when the smoke woke me."

The hand on his leg squeezed gently and rubbed. "Want to talk about it?"

He wasn't sure what he'd say. He had both an encyclopedia and not a single word on the subject in his head. Mostly he was just tired. "Can I ask you something?"

"Anything you like."

He stroked her hair, wrapping the strands around his fingers. He'd always loved her hair. "What did Loki say to you?"

She went very still. It took her a few moments to answer and he wondered if she was deciding whether or not to lie. "Some things about my past. Told me my ledger was dripping red and there was no way to balance it." She sighed. "And he said that he would have you kill me and wake you up long enough to see what you'd done before killing you, too."

He wound another lock around his fingers. "His. . . thing compelled me to follow orders," he told her. "I outlined the team - whatever I knew. He said to tell him everything. I know about four sentences on Steve, maybe up to ten on Stark. You I just kept talking. I think I told him your shoe size." She chuckled, just a tiny bit, and he kept talking. "He actually had to tell me to stop. He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes and said, 'My word, are you in love with her?'" Beneath his hands, she stilled again. "I couldn't lie to him. So I said yes. He gave me this terrible grin and said, 'Oh, now that is something I can _use_."

She propped herself up on her elbows. "He asked me - when I asked about you - if it was love. Like I would tell him. I said love was for children and I was only interested in wiping a debt, because I was the Widow at the time." She shook her head. "Asshole didn't even know he was getting played." She looked up at him. "You have to know how I feel about you. After these last few days."

"I know. . . I don't know what I know. We are both so bad at this." He swallowed. "But I do. Love you. In all possible ways. Been like that for longer than I care to think about. And somebody tried to use that as a weapon." 

She sat up and scooted onto his lap, not straddling, but draped across. "We're always going to be each other's weak spot, Clint. I fought that a really long time. But people get in . Sneak under the armor." She sighed and rested her head on his shoulder. "Maybe love is for children, for fairy tales. But fairy tales are important. They reassure us we can slay the dragons. That the hero gets his happy ending." He felt her kiss his jaw, feather light. "I love you, too."

His arms tightened around her, and he bent to press his face into her hair. Something he'd been carrying around a long time unknotted itself in his chest. He wasn't entirely sure love was even an adequate word to describe what he felt for her, but it would have to do. "I don't know if people like us get happy endings."

"Well, I'll settle for happy intermissions in our luxury apartments in Stark Tower." She lifted her head and kissed him. "Take what you can get."

He held her face in his hands. "I think I just might."


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to SweetTea for her lovely betaing.
> 
> Warning: cameos.

The first thing that occurred to Natasha when she woke up was that her cell phone had blown up with the house. The bar had a landline, so she called into SHIELD from there. They told her the plane had already landed, and helpfully offered to patch her through to check in. 

The voice that answered, "Hello, Agent Romanov," was familiar, and she chuckled. They had, apparently, _literally_ sent the cavalry. 

"Agent May. I heard you were driving a desk."

She could almost hear the shrug. "Shit happens. Now I'm driving the bus. We're at the mine's airfield. They were. . . surprised to see us, but it's been dealt with. Can you come over here for a debrief?"

She glanced over at Clint, who was just starting to rouse. "Give me ten," she told her. If there was time, maybe she could introduce May to the joys of still vodka.

They hung up and she went over to poke Clint with her toes. "Team's here. I'm heading to the mine for debrief. You want to come?"

He set up slowly and scrubbed his hand over his face. He seemed to hesitate, and her heart-rate sped up, just a little. "I'm not up for a debrief just yet. I know I'm going to have to do it, but. . ." He shrugged. He looked up and gave her a reassuring smile. "I have to go find Joe and tell him he just acquired a bar." He unzipped the bag and stood. "I don't know who is on that plane. You should warn them I'm coming, in case anybody has a problem with that."

"It was May on the phone," she offered, sitting by his legs to put her boots on. "Apparently, she un-semi-retired herself." She finished dressing in a few motions and leaned over for a kiss. "I don't think you have to worry about her. She's pragmatic."

He smiled. "No. May is fine. I worked an op with her once. She asked, rather derisively, why I don't use a rifle like a normal sniper. She sent me an email after New York; all it said was, 'I retract my previous statements about the bow'."

Nat grinned and stood. "Good. I was going to invite he back for a drink once the technicalities were done." She slipped his knife into her boot - her weapons had blown up too - and headed for the door. "See you in a while," she called over her shoulder.

"Take the snowmobile," he called after her.

The coat she was wearing - someone had left it in the bar - smelled like beer and cigarettes. Her ugly knit hat was rusty orange and had a fuzzy pom-pom on top. The layers underneath were not any better. She needed a shower, smelled like woodsmoke, and had a small burn hole in the back of her pants that was letting in cold air. It was certainly the most undignified outfit she'd ever presented herself to anyone in. So when the back ramp of the plane lowered, and there was a tall, dark haired man she didn't recognize standing there, she wasn't even surprised when he said, " _You're_ Natasha Romanov?"

She sighed a little and let the Widow do the talking. "Yes. My ID was blown up last night and I don't think you'll enjoy any of the other ways I know how to prove who I am."

May appeared behind the man. "Nice hat." She inclined her head, an invitation to come aboard.

"Thanks." She walked past the door guard and shook May's hand. "Good to see you. Mine's secure?"

May gave her a terse account of events which was promptly interrupted by a longer, winding, tech-jargon heavy explanation from the science division. May wandered off about halfway through, leaving Nat to listen to the Brit and the Scot talk over each other in their excitement. She had a feeling that any other time talking to Agent Romanov would have sent them into a gibbering panic, but, apparently, aliens were more exciting.

“We sent the dwarves in and there’s no evidence of an entry point,” the guy said, gesturing with a control panel he had balanced on one palm.

“No tunnels or anything that would be big enough for the ship to pass through,” the girl confirmed with a pert nod.

“Near as we can figure, its been there a few months. Less than a year.”

  “Our current theory is it had the misfortune of running through one of the wormholes caused in the Convergence.”

  “Most of those were centralized around England.”

“Greenwich,” the girl clarified with another of those perky nods. “But we do have evidence of small ones occurring in other cities. And apparently in the other realms it was quite random.”

“So, just some alien, joy riding about and took a wrong turn.” The Scot grinned like it was a good joke. “Musta scared him to death.”

“Fitz, you know that’s a fallacy. It’s far more likely the atmosphere of Earth was-”

Nat held up a hand. “Wait. There was an actual alien?”

“A body, yes,” the girl said with big eyed sincerity. “Very decomposed. Fitz here won’t let me dissect it on board-”

  “Cat! In our fridge!”

“That was one time.”

“It’s a lab, not a morgue,” he concluded primly.

The girl sighed expressively. “ _But_ we were able to pack it in ice and will be transporting it to the Hub once we drop you wherever we’re dropping you,” she concluded with a smile. “Any questions?”

Nat’s head was starting to hurt from all the back and forth. That had honestly been way more information than she’d needed. She was a little afraid what actual follow up questions would get her. So, she said the first thing that came to her mind. “Did one of you invent a dendrotoxin?”

They blinked in unison, then the girl raised her hand almost timidly, “Yes?”

Nat pointed at the guy - Fitz. “So you must be the one that made the computer shorting arrowhead.”

“I make a lot of things,” he said, sounding vaguely confused.

“Why?” the girl asked.

“Clint mentioned you the other day. He likes your work. He’ll enjoy meeting you.”

They stared at her a moment. “Clint Barton?” Fitz asked. Nat nodded.

The girl gripped her partner’s arm with both hands. “Hawkeye knows who we are,” she squeaked through her teeth. “He uses my dendrotoxin on his arrows.” She was all but bouncing in glee.

 Well, it would probably do Clint some good to have a fan girl. Even if she did look young enough to be his daughter.

Nat left them to their squeeing and found May loitering in the cargo bay. “When do we leave?”

“Ship’s almost out of the ice. Once it’s secure I’ll do first checks. Wheels up by eighteen hundred."

"Great." She was always going to be a little nostalgic for Stitch Point and the changes it had brought to her and Clint. But good God was she ready for some fresh fruit and sushi. "There's another agent up here with me who'll be bugging out with us." May arched a brow and she added. "It's Clint Barton. The brains are fine with it. I know you know him. Got anyone on your bus that'll have a problem with that?"

"We know. About Barton. Director Fury actually sent us deliberately. To bring you something he felt might encourage you both to come back to work."

"Or blow the plane up," said a voice - an impossible, but familiar voice - from the staircase above her. "Blowing the plane up was on his list of possible reactions." She craned her neck, and there was Phil Coulson standing on the stairs. "Hello, Natasha."

Nat stared and for a second the whole world just froze on her. She forced herself to take a step, then another, and another until she was at the base of the stairs. "Coulson," she said and her voice was so rough she didn't recognize it. "You were dead."

He came down to the last step. "Yeah," he said in a quiet, almost regretful voice. She was pretty sure there was a story there but it'd probably take all of Clint's vodka to get it out of him.

She took a deep breath through her nose and glanced over at May, who gave her a perfunctory nod that pretty much answered all the questions she had. She looked back at Coulson, then lurched forward and hugged him. "Missed you," she muttered into his suit. 

He returned the hug, and said a quiet, "I missed you, too." He nodded at May and she and the other agent dispersed. She followed Coulson upstairs, to his office. "Fury lied to the Avengers about my death, and then got tangled in it. Declared my continued existence level 7 and called it a day."

It hadn't been a lie. She and Clint had gone to see his body after the battle. Clint had wanted to, and at the time, she thought indulging him was a good idea. She had enough of a sense of what SHIELD was capable of to not be surprised at anything anymore, though. And every instinct told her Coulson didn't want to be interrogated about it. Whatever it was, it was still raw. 

But the 'how' wasn't really the issue anyway. "I'm a level 8. So is Barton."

"There were questions as to how stable he was. And doubts that you'd keep it from him if we told just you."

Well, that was probably true. She'd have told him. Or found a way for him to find out. Probably the others, too. And one of them almost certainly would have punched Fury through a window. Say what you would about the man, he had a finely honed sense of self preservation. "And now he's sending you out to us. Like a peace offering."

"There's all sorts of shit going on right now. We can't afford to have two of our best agents hiding out in bum-fuck Alaska."

"He'd already decided to come back," she said quietly. "Fury needs to learn to have a little faith in me." She paused. "He might blow up your plane, though."

“If he does that, FitzSimmons won’t make him any more arrows.” He paused, then added seriously, "How is he?"

She considered the question carefully. "Better than he was a week ago. We've talked. He feels. . . a lot of guilt. But I think he's trying to look past it. The stares bothered him. The distrust. I don't know what to do about that, other than break bones like an overprotective sibling."

For a moment, Coulson's eyes were haunted. "Someone messing inside your brain is the most intimate of violations. Having people angry at you for something someone else made you do, leaving you to clean up the mess." He looked away. "It'll take time. Everything does."

She reached across the desk and curled her fingers over his. She waited for him to look at her. "Come and see Clint. Have some vodka. We can start a club for people who've been totally fucked in the head. Maybe we can invite Selvig, if he agrees to wear pants."

That made him chuckle. "According to the report, he swears he can't sense temperature anymore." Speaking of temperature, it was really warm on this plane. Or maybe it was just her first exposure to normal central heating in a week. She tugged the ugly sweatshirt over her head. Her tank top had bloodstains on it, but Coulson didn't comment. 

"Clint has the temperature thing, too," she told him. "Called it a hangover from what Loki did. Doesn't have any other super powers from what I-" Coulson was staring at something on her shoulder. She glanced down to see a particularly impressive hickey right at the juncture of her shoulder and neck. She could probably explain it away as an injury from a fight. But people in SHIELD tended to be experts on bruise patterns. And that was pretty obviously a hickey.

She covered her eyes with a hand and muttered, "Fuck," under her breath.

"As long as your tactics work," he said mildly, "I do not judge."

This had to be what being caught by your parents while making out in the rec room felt like. She obviously had no frame of reference for it, but the embarrassment level felt about right. "It's not tactics," she said, not sure if she was confessing or defending herself. "It's just. . . us. The real us."

"Ah, dammit it," he said, and she looked up, ready to explain. To yell at him. To quit her job. But he was grinning. "Apparently I owe Hill fifty bucks."

She arched a brow. "Seriously?" She shook her head, but could feel her mouth twitching into a grin. She grabbed her sweatshirt and stood. "Come on. I think Clint would handle seeing you a little better if he's on his own turf."

"You want a shower and a change of clothes first?"

Oh, that had never sounded so good. "I would not be opposed."

She took a long shower. Between the fighting, the acrobatics, the explosion and the night sleeping on the bar floor, every inch of her body ached, and the hot water felt so good. She'd have drained that plane's entire tank if she hadn't decided she should save some for Clint. He was likely as grimy as she. 

An armload of clothes had been brought to her by a woman named Skye, who didn't look much like a SHIELD agent, but seemed to have decent taste in clothes. It was better than the man-sized BDUs she was expecting to be stuck with. The woman was well endowed enough that she even tried on the bra that was included. It was a little small, and did some things to her cleavage that Clint would probably like, but she found a shirt in the pile that would keep her from flashing it around the bus. 

Skye had also brought her a compact with cover up in it. She was contemplating her embarrassment when the speaker by the door of the tiny bathroom beeped. "This is May. We need you outside right now. Barton's got Coulson at gunpoint."

Nat looked up at the ceiling a moment. "Fuck." She shoved her feet into boots and grabbed the leather jacket Skye had left. "Copy," she told the intercom before sprinting out of the room and down to the hanger. 

They were out beyond the ramp. Clint was behind a snowmobile he'd apparently come out on, pointing his handgun at Coulson, who was just standing there holding his hands up. May and the other guy - Ward, she thought his name was - were on the ramp with their guns drawn.

She strode past them, mindful of their sight lines and went to stand just behind and to the side of Coulson. "Clint," she said in her calmest voice. "Stand down. He's real."

He lowered the gun just a tad, his eyes focussing on her. "I'm glad I haven't snapped and begun hallucinating. Don't necessarily make him actually Coulson."

Good point. She wracked her brain a moment, well aware there were still two highly trained guns at their backs. "Coulson. Baghdad. What did you say when Clint brought me on board?"

Without missing a beat, he replied in the exact some indulgently exasperated tone he'd used then, "'Barton, you had one job and it did not involve taking in strays.' And he replied that if it weren't for taking in strays we wouldn't have any friends."

He looked from Coulson to her and back. Then he lowered the gun, dropping it on the ground and climbing over the snowmobile. She heard motion behind her and turned long enough to give May a look that indicated that if she took one more step forward, they were finally going to find out which one of them would win in a fight. She got a nod in reply.

Clint had stopped two feet from Coulson. "I saw your body. The night after New York. It was _cold_."

Coulson tensed a little and she had a moment of fear this was going to go south again. But all he said was, "When Fury moves heaven and earth? They move."

"Son of a bitch," Clint said, and then he reached out and hugged Coulson. There was manly back slapping. May and Ward lowered their weapons. Natasha started towards the men, close enough to hear Clint say. "I'm sorry, Boss."

Coulson gave him a particularly firm slap on the back. "It's good to have you back, Hawk."

When she reached them, they were both facing her. She watched Clint tip his head back and blink rapidly, but she didn't comment. They might talk about it later.

That thought made her smile.

"I'll give you two a minute," Coulson said. As he strolled away, he tossed, "Try to keep your clothes on," over his shoulder.

Clint gave her a look and she sighed and tugged the neck of her shirt down. "You bite," she told him. "You tell Joe about his windfall?"

" _I_ bite. I have a permanent scar of your teeth on my arm." He held out his arm. This wasn't just New York he was making a joke about. It was the fight he'd had with her. Now that was progress. "Joe was excited. I just grabbed a couple of things." He gestured at the large bundle strapped to the snowmobile.

"You brought some vodka, right?" She watched him unstrap the pack. "I think there's a lot of people on this bus that need to try your vodka."

"I did. There are four bottles in the saddlebags." He undid the last bungee cord and peeled the blanket off to reveal the bear head.

She couldn't help it, she laughed out loud, shaking her head. She stepped closer to him and patted the bear's head before sliding an arm through his. "I think we should call him Boris."

From somewhere up the ramp, she heard Coulson yell, "Will you hurry up? This is making my bus cold."

Clint leaned over and kissed the top of her head. "Come on. Let's go home."


	11. Epilogue

"I'm just saying, why go ladder when you can go fireman pole?"

Most people, when faced with glares from two of the deadliest assassins in the world, would probably cower. Or at least backtrack in their snark.

Tony Stark wasn't most people.

"Ladders are so last century," he added, bringing up his ever changing blueprints on his desk terminal. "What's wrong with the elevator?"

"We want to be able to use each other's practice rooms without disturbing each other," Nat said in that smooth way that meant she was playing him.

"Bullshit, you're aware of cleaning people two floors up." He leaned over to pull up the elevator data. It went back between their floors frequently. Very frequently. At two AM last Wednesday, it had been stopped between those floors for 17 minutes. He wondered if either of them knew he had security cameras in the elevators. He quirked a brow at them. "Practice rooms, huh?"

Nat gave Barton a look that said quite clearly "You've done something stupid and I'm going to kill you now." Tony knew that look. Pepper looked at him like that all the time.

"I told you we should have just rappelled," Nat said through her teeth.

"He would have noticed you drilling a hole in the floor," Barton said with a sigh.

"I'm not angry that you weren't honest," Tony said. "I'm just disappointed." Nat made a noise that indicated his life expectancy was going down again. He poked at the blueprints again. "I can put in a proper staircase, you know. Or did you specifically want a ladder?"

Tony watched them exchange looks. Of course this was going to be a thing. Stairs made it, for all intents and purposes, a two story apartment they were sharing, as opposed to some trap door for sex. They were probably going to argue about that silently for a while.

While they did so, he reached over and opened the directory containing the elevator footage, and deleted all of last Wednesday. Pepper would kill him if he didn't, regardless of his still lingering curiosity to see what Nat's tits looked like. 

He waited while they had their silent argument and hid a smile. Nat had brought Barton back from the Alaskan wilds almost a month ago and the archer had set up in his apartment like he'd never left. Tony hadn't known the guy well before the shit with Loki went down. Knew Nat a little better. But from what he could glean, he was a changed man, though no one could pin down exactly how. Tony thought he seemed pretty together for someone who'd been mindraped by an alien god. And hell, apparently he'd finally gotten Nat in bed so-

"Shit," he said aloud. "I owe Banner money."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to our beta, SweetTea.
> 
> Thanks also to all the readers and commenters. We really appreciate your feedback and we're so glad you've enjoyed our foray into Clintasha. There is more to come as we are having a great time exploring their relationship.
> 
> We'll be posting a sequel soon. :)


End file.
